gowanus atropolis

by Julian Talamantez Brolaski

Poetry. LGBT Studies. gowanus atropolis is an ecopoetical exploration of the Gowanus canal in Brooklyn, a recently designated superfund site that was once a fertile fishing ground for the Canarsie Native American tribe. The poems grapple with reconciling 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.' gowanus atropolis reinscribes, as always already present, both queer and Native spaces in and around the Gowanus through a radical reshaping of English.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

100 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 2011

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

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."

[Mills College Library]

811.6 B867g 2011

[André Habet · Rating 5 out of 5]

loved this book. every poem remakes English. even when silly, it feels like a fist to the jaw.

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

not/quite (cows in texas)
whats lost in the pasteurization
whats left hanging by its
neck in the pasture
whats left but to censure
whos left in the pasture
the cow ringing its neck the cow
ringing its hands
the air wincing w/
newest snow, not quite
snow
when the mixture has reduced
snu in hand
when the pasture
confounds the sailor
when hemoglobin hits the racks
and the cow bleeds
and the cow
not quite dead in the machine
but the cow is—and I
o cow I
I vow
I vow to see cow as cow
in amarillo
n/thing but beef and god (17)

[AJ Lonski · Rating 4 out of 5]

An elegy of identity and consequence

[Erik Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

"wel cd they speke englysshe / polymorphously"