Centuries

by Brouwer, Joel

• ISBN13: 9781884800399
• ISBN10: 1884800394
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-03-01
• Publisher: Four Way Books

Summary

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.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

5000	3	(4)
Debut	4	(1)
Bridge	5	(1)
Bicycle	6	(1)
Explanations	7	(1)
Childhood	8	(1)
Diagnosis	9	(1)
Marked	10	(1)
Father	11	(1)
Aesthetics	12	(1)
Serena	13	(1)
Vodka	14	(1)
N	15	(1)
Proposal	16	(1)
Idea	17	(1)
Master	18	(1)
Meadow	19	(1)
Michigan	20	(1)
Recluse	21	(1)
Clearing	22	(1)
Wedding	23	(1)
Disease	24	(1)
Party	25	(1)
Zokar	26	(1)
Lana Turner	27	(1)
Forgiveness	28	(1)
Demonstration	29	(1)
Ambition	30	(1)
Heaven	31	(1)
Detroit	32	(1)
Court-Martial	33	(1)
Ideas	34	(1)
Noah	35	(1)
Tiramisu	36	(1)
Joyce	37	(1)
Hors d'Oeuvres	38	(1)
Divorce	39	(1)
Crematorium	40	(1)
Hero	41	(1)
History	42	(1)
Nova Scotia	43	(1)
Ignorance	44	(1)
Stray	45	(1)
Mexico	46	(1)
Portage	47	(1)
Tumor	48	(1)
Application	49	(1)
Amaryllis	50	(1)
Teacher	51	(1)
Century	52	(3)
Acknowledgments	55