Spleen Elegy
Perhaps like all memories, particularly traumatic ones, the relationships between the lyric speaker and observable world in Spleen Elegy are all pixelated phenomena, shifting in and out of focus, hardness.
A Turkish Dictionary
Wessels continuously tries to overcome the problem of representation by projecting his images onto an intricate, arabesque structure where it becomes almost impossible to trace the end or the beginning of distinct phenomena.
Seaside Ghazal
we shouted out of car windows / uttered our incomplete goodbyes // see you later, Shifting Inlet / or whatever good friends say // who haven’t known each other long—
Prayer for Appetite
What whispers suckle, tugs / spines upright, name god. // Acolytes—mice sniffing / a wet breeze, blouse milk- // soaked at an infant’s cry, / universe ever expanding.
Oh cosmic through line,
teach the weaker sex your
bruising grip.
Beyond Love
If the saints are to be believed, if this body is a dress / we slip into, out of, if each day and night is the mantle / we tie around our shoulders, fabric thin as the time it takes
Marriage Abstract
I love you like my hands, which haul / the money in. Into our laps spill daughter / and son. We are drowning in wine and beer, / carrying each other across these rooms, / glasses filled above our brims.
Wherever We Mean to Be: Selected Poems 1975–2015
The most solitary poems, the ones that take the speaker for a walk through a city or down a dirt path, through a churchyard or a garden, always remind one of how important it is to spend time alone, getting to know your own universe.
I Know Your Kind
Brewer investigates how drug use has ravaged a community and the lives of users, enablers, and those fortunate enough to have survived.
Service
Much of the difficulty in relating our perceptions of the world has to do with naming, and it has always been this way.
The Happy End / All Welcome
No matter how many hours we may be chained to our office chair, no matter our posture in it, or how Sisyphusean our work life may seem, our imagination is a small and gleeful subversion taking place under the glare of the office gods.