gowanus atropolis

Julian Talamantez Brolaski

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse

PubDate: 2/1/2011

ISBN: 9781933254814

Binding: PAPERBACK

Price: $15.00

Quantity Available: 8

Pages: 104

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Poetry. LGBT Studies. GOWANUS ATROPOLIS attempts to reconcile the toxicity of the titular Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn and the east river in "Manahatta" with the poet's search for the pastoral in New York City. A queer elegy for when language might have been prior to thought, where the phrase becomes the thought, rather than the other way around—so that the dystopic might become, if not utopic, at least measurable / pleasurable, "melodious offal." "Once in a while there are poems which create entire fresh terrain. And I'm saying too that it's hard to come home from it, locator dials set anew. I'm jangling from the return, like the world had descended upon me so quickly through the poems it was some time before I realized I was still in one piece, and minted with a beautiful little scar. Julian's deviance is a hazard of poems which bend the muscle of light. I can hardly wait to share our extra strength when we've all read them!"—CAConrad.

Author City: BROOKLYN, NY USA

Julian T. Brolaski is the author of GOWANUS ATROPOLIS (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011) and ADVICE FOR LOVERS (City Lights Publishers, 2012), as well as the chapbooks Hellish Death Monsters (Spooky Press, 2001), Letters to Hank Williams (True West Press, 2003), The Daily Usonian (Atticus/Finch, 2004), Madame Bovary's Diary (Cy Press, 2005), and A Buck in a Corridor (flynpyntar, 2008). Brolaski lives in Brooklyn where xe is an editor at Litmus Press, curates vaudeville shows, and plays country music with The Low & the Lonesome.

Reviews and Other Links
author blog
The Low & the Lonesome
Publishers Weekly
Nicolle Elizabeth @ The Believer

“Aspirate all h’s and brace to meet Sludgie, ‘erstwhal’ of the Gowanus, displaced echolocator through a lush verbal wildering of neologisms, hot archaisms, and barbed portmanteaus. Brolaski finds the ‘herm’ in ‘hermunculae’ and puts the ‘gee’ back in ‘ambigenuity.’ The tongue hasn’t sounded this flexed and full since Chaucer lapped up Romance, but these damesirs sing instruction with their fishairs: one ‘ynvents a grammatical order’ so to ‘speke englysshe/polymorphously.’”
—Rodney Koeneke

“GOWANUS ATROPOLIS, it made me want to build a better blurb. A biggerish blur. Not an index, even if I could—‘wots left of the ecosystem’ sings. But—I don’t know what atropolis means—that’s ok, that’s what the poems said to me. It’s a place. GOWANUS ATROPOLIS: neighborhoods that came before, and inside, language, as it built itself, apart from itself, just as so many bodies, being neither one gender nor the opposite, give dictionaries the slip. Also places in New York, California, fleshy with fishes and asphalt, submerged yet audible histories. These poems don’t build a new dictionary so much as they create new forms of being intensely present to that which so often gets left out, which disappears as standard usage hardens us into place. The elisions. The middle. The sounds that move between persons and phones, in a cloud on the train, or the screen. Nonsense, too—that which confounds owners and upsets all contracts fills these lyrics with a mysterious energy. Everywhere I turn, ‘a buck in the corridor,’ encounters I cannot reason or push or identify my way through. I stand still. A little giddy. Our eyes meet.”
—Stephanie Young

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