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And So by Joel Brouwer
"And So", by Joel Brouwer
A review by Ron Slate
"The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities," wrote Susan Sontag while thinking about E.M. Cioran. Thoroughly up-to-date -- meaning cut off from the future and removed from the past -- a poet is stranded in the present, just like everybody else. But since the poet cares most about making a poem ("an emotionally disturbing structure made of words" -- X.J. Kennedy), and since words are his medium, he feels the pinch, caught between the language of living a decent life ("please pass the salt" or "wanna go to the movies?") and the explanations of that life by news anchors and expert witnesses. The saltshaker is almost always too heavy an object to lift into the imagination, and the Sunday supplement stains both the palm and the mind with a toxic petroleum derivative. So the poet cultivates both an aversion to power asserted through language and an urge to wield that power more tellingly. We have spent the past hundred years thrashing the underbrush to drive...
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