Centuries

by Joel Brouwer

Overview

Joel Brouwer writes prose poems that walk a wire of anxiety through contemporary life where "you realize you're naked under your coat, you don't remember a single line, and you'll have to go on like that, you'll have to go on and sing." And yet the pieces in Centuries are so various and unpredictable and startling, sometimes hyperbolic, often sordid. "The garage smells of turpentine and dirty magazines. The freezer hums with meat. You pour yourself an insecticide martini, scratch idly at your wart, and chit-chat with a cricket." Brouwer's universe, finally, as it springs and bristles with odd, nightmarish details and human voices, is able to circle back to a place of consolation where "A body has soft and hards parts, like a piano. Music comes from where they meet." In the end, Brouwer uses the disparate contingencies of existence like an instrument through which he can control chaos through art, through language.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781884800399
Publisher:	Four Way Books
Publication date:	03/01/2003
Series:	Stahlecker Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	66
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

JOEL BROUWER's first book of poems, Exactly What Happened (Purdue University Press, 1999), won the Verna Emery Poetry Prize and the Larry Levis Reading Prize. He has received fellowships from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. HIs poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, Boston Review, Chelsea, Paris Review, Parnassus, Ploughshares, The Progressive, Southwest Review, and other publications. He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and teaches at the University of Alabama.

Read an Excerpt

Century

The art in the museum, exhausted and damp, demanded solitude. We're tired of crying your tears! We hereby decree the purifying change and henceforth reject the trash! Now scram! When curators offered to compromise by admitting only the blind, the art replied by suicide: each piece became a mirror. Beneah a bench we found a photograph of Eva Braun and Hitler locked in a deep wet kiss. She's nude, milk-blue against his black uniform. He has a riding crop in each hand. We shoved to see. Such a beautiful picture! It had to be: it was that or the mirrors.

Table of Contents

5000 3 Debut 4 Bridge 5 Bicycle 6 Explanations 7 Childhood 8 Diagnosis 9 Marked 10 Father 11 Aesthetics 12 Serena 13 Vodka14 N 15 Proposal 16 Idea 17 Master 18 Meadow 19 Michigan 20 Recluse 21 Clearing 22 Wedding 23 Disease 24 Party 25 Zokar 26 Lana Turner 27 Forgiveness 28 Demonstration 29 Ambition 30 Heaven 31 Detroit 32 Court-Martial 33 Ideas 34 Noah 35 Tiramisu 36 Joyce 37 Hors d'Oeuvres 38 Divorce 39 Crematorium 40 Hero 41 History 42 Nova Scotia 43 Ignorance 44 Stray 45 Mexico 46 Portage 47 Tumor 48 Application 49 Amaryllis 50 Teacher 51 Century 52 Acknowledgments 55

What People are Saying About This

Andrei Codrescu

"These hundred word 'centuries' as Joel Brouwer playfully calls them, are filled with an esprit of times lived energetically in language vigorous and forthright. They work as missiles, pastries, or treasure chests."

Adam Zagajewski

"Joel Brouwer's prose poems are like razor blades, sharp and flexible. It's an immense pleasure to be led by this poet's imagination, to be abruptly guided to all possible corners of our—and not only our—world."