front cover of As Long as We're Here
As Long as We're Here
Joel Brouwer
Four Way Books

As Long as We’re Here is an off-key anthem, a funhouse mirror held up to our dumpster fire era. Chronically online, distracted and distracting, with too many browser tabs open at once, attentive to everything and focused on nothing, Brouwer delights in the late capitalist absurdities of sleeping apps and internet dance crazes, and riffs on the argot of the group chat and the team meeting. These slippery poems both suffer from and revel in their ADD. Their shifts are as fleet as our news feeds, their serpentine sentences leap from barroom jests to high modernist splendor and back. But the book is not all fun and games. Dreamy tales of edgelords and loyalty oaths often arrive at places of surprising pathos and beauty. Mortality gnaws at the narrators of these poems, and political unrest lurks in the background. Still, a sense of solidarity—that we of the title, a recurring pronoun throughout—keeps despair at bay. Indeed, As Long as We’re Here is a book of intimacy, of the coterie. Friends and lovers people its lyrics, which often feel like late-night hang sessions with eccentric, wise-cracking pals. Full of wry wisdom and lush music, As Long as We’re Here knows what to do with a diminished thing: make it sing.

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Off Message
Joel Brouwer
Four Way Books, 2016
In fiber-optic-fast meditations on everything from Marxism to the Marianas Trench, Off Message probes the troubling corners of our globalized lives with humor, pathos, and verve. Political without being preachy, contemporary without being cloying, funny without being flip, these poems are unafraid to implicate themselves: like us, their speakers are part of the problem, and their struggles highlight the absurdities of broadband capitalism. What should we think of televised warfare, crackdowns on Twitter, and factory farms? What pages should we take from our history books? Off Message wrestles with questions like these by overlaying the near and the far, the lyric and the encyclopedic. Each poem is a mixtape, an abandoned essay, a satire of modern conscience.
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