My Life in Brutalist Architecture

by John Gallaher

As John Gallaher prefaces this book, “It should have been an easy story to sort out, but it took fifty years.” My Life in Brutalist Architecture confronts the truth of the author’s adoption after a lifetime of concealment and deceptions with lucid candor, startling humor, and implacable grief. Approaching identity and family history as a deliberate architecture, Gallaher’s poems illuminate how a simple exterior can obscure the structural bricolage and emotional complexity of its inner rooms. This collection explores — and mourns — the kaleidoscopic iterations of potential selves as prismed through our understanding of the past, a shifting light parsed by facts, memories, and a family’s own mythology. The agonizing beauty of My Life in Brutalist Architecture is its full embrace of doubt, a jack that makes space for repair even as it wrenches one apart. After his daughter’s birth, the author considers the only picture of himself before the adoption, captioned “Marty, nine mos.” In legal documentation, in the photographic archive, this child no longer exists. “I appear next as John, three-and- a-half,” Gallaher writes, “and Marty disappears, a ghost name.” “And so, then, what does the self consist of?” he asks. The answer is, necessarily, no answer. “The theme is time. The theme is unspooling,” Gallaher summarizes, testifying to a story’s inability to recover the past or isolate its meaning. Equal parts reckoning and apologia, Gallaher’s latest work disrupts the notion that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, attesting to the irrevocable harm of silence, while offering mercy in its recognition of our guardians as deeply flawed conduits of care. Referencing Vitruvius’s foundational elements of architecture (firmitas, utilitas, and venustas, or solidity, usefulness, and beauty), Gallaher fuses an elegy and an ode to family when he writes “that in the third principle of architecture, / they bathe you and feed you. You won’t remember. // And they know this.” Gallaher’s lyricism encapsulates this, humanity’s consummate tragedy and profoundest grace — that love, even when forgotten, persists. 

Genres: Poetry

138 pages, Paperback

Published March 15, 2024

Reviews

[Alicia Hoffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly cohesive collection about adoption, but also about existence. Gallaher walks the tightrope of the sacred and the profane, the celestial and the mundane, juggling complexities with such nuance and seamlessness. I love his work - his poems are like imprints of consciousness that come with the most surprising epiphanies. These poems make me look at the world differently, which is exactly what poems should do.

[Five · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought a really interesting poetry collection about the trials and tribulations of being adopted. I was hesitant about it at first because poetry that consistently has just really long lines puts me off. But, it was good, some really clear cool imagery, and an overall moving story to the collection.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

For Gallaher’s last few books, the discursive has been like a vehicle, a means for articulating the congress of sounds that drive the poet’s confusion or his inquiry into confusion or his assurance that somewhere amidst the patterns made by confusion is either more confusion or something sensible. A dilemma about origin, or identity, or selfhood, or the present. Whatever it is many people use for solid ground in their lives, and Gallaher acknowledges the efficacy of “solid ground,” while also allowing it might have a hollowness at its core. But, to extend the idling engine metaphor, Gallaher can also hear the shuttling sound that is an idling engine, or the sound of an engine cruising the streets beside his house, beside the house he remembers growing up in, beside the home where his mother lived, that engine sound would seem to belie the hollowness. Because a combustion engine maintains a constant state of activity inside any of its engine cavities—a hollow space itself, capable of housing the explosions, that throw the the piston out, that converts mechanically into a vehicle’s forward motion. If movement or sound could be considered the solid ground of a combustion engine, what is the reality of its hollow cavities?

Not that that’s what adoption is. What I’m describing are Gallaher’s poems as houses of movement and thinking. What might root someone in selfhood? To what degree is selfhood a fiction extrapolated from what you want to see and what you’re constantly reminded you can’t see about past and family? There is no doubt, to me, that Gallaher’s life has been a series of forward momentums, and it’s hard to trust any of them are a fully forward step ahead. What is the beginning of self? What is the mythology assembling into this self that, from a young age, knows the instability, and, as Gallaher’s book reveals, has to keep assuring the people around the self that their self is really there.

My God, why can I not write a review that isn’t just doing what Gallaher’s book is doing. Which is inching forward. Then measuring back to uncover whether the advance was precisely an inch. And I know Gallaher says writing into metaphor is cheap. I’m cheap. I’ll admit it. Reading Gallaher’s book is like selling knock-off watches in Times Square, but it’s 1991, and maybe this timepiece is real. Maybe 1991 is more real than 2021. And I’m writing like John Gallaher AGAIN! Maybe this is the spoiler I’ve been trying to keep you from. Whoever reads book reviews. Doing the John Gallaher is so much pleasurable. Because it’s like writing metaphor and pretending it’s just what happens in a day. But you know the metaphor is likely the best part of the day. Like when Gallaher does that perfect parking job, and you kind of wish that someone had been there. And then you realize there were plenty of people there, he's just not someone they care about. And there’s something in there that’s a metaphor for something. The engine is idling. And though the car isn’t moving, the vehicle is still acting very much like a vehicle, making motion and velocity around the hollownesses inside the engine block. What Gallaher knows best in this book is the play of speculation, the play of near-metaphor that swerves quickly away from being full-metaphor.

It’s like the experience of being a parent after you had parents who would be more accurately described as near-parents. But you look ungrateful saying that. And Gallaher’s life as an adopted child has meant a whole life being aware of this. What is the identify of a parent? What does ancestry.com have to say about life? What does your birth mother remember about you growing up, and how does that compare to what you know yourself? Yes, I’m doing my best John Gallaher impersonation again, because the way he writes into this life feels just like it must be his life.

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

MAGIC BOAT RIDE
“My adoptive mother's father died on Christmas Day, when she was three, and my adoptive father told us it made Christmas hard for her. She was only three, and how could we imagine that? It really got to him. The holiday season, you throw your heart. Please send gifts. / Please don't. When they adopted me, I was three. They had me call them "New Mommy" and "New Daddy." Over time, the old life falls away. Now, though, I feel I should say something. I think I know how she felt. You're in a department store, and this song keeps playing. It sounds like distant rain. Maybe an audience shuffling. And look how colorful language is, like when one "has a baby," we "had a baby," and then it's called "natural born," to distinguish it from being adopted, which makes the adopted, what? "Unnatural born"? And were told, no, it doesn't mean that, you're overreacting, but when you're adopted, you do a lot of living between denotation and connotation. My favorite scene in Willy Wonka is the magic boat ride. Our blurred and secret projections in a psychedelic slosh. My mother, waking for a Christmas that will never come. Me, forgetting my name. If you can forget your own name, you can forget anything. That's the part that gets me. The New York Times ethicist is writing today that the point of adoption is that your family identity becomes that of your adoptive family. You are substituted. You’ve been purchased and taken home, and don't need to wonder where you were before. Should my mother have forgotten her father? And so, what are the rules for each piece of candy one is offered? I need to remind myself to ask that. You have this thing you don't want to look at, so you look everywhere else, and everyone sees this curious child, this brand-new outfit.”

I am not a huge poetry reader but I love this book. Maybe I’m into poetry now.

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

This seems invented. Not invented in the sense of being made-up, not in the sense of a tall-tale meant to distract, but invented in the way that a starter gun creates a stray yesterday, in the way that a chapter can absolve closure of its premature end. The riven this I speak of is John Gallaher’s movingly erased illumination as hallucinated by the nextness of now and as given the progressively remnant title of My Life In Brutalist Architecture. As memoir, as poem, as a thing secretly narrated and openly recorded, as hybrid meditation on adoption and lonely séance held for belonging, it is not a story for everyone but is a telling for all. Show me everything. The ‘hard joke, friend’, the cell clocked by the wrong time, the astronaut’s double, and the scar that won’t scar. Gallaher’s verse goes by quickly, but is not a single note, is not a brief music. It sings and songs itself into such inquiry that its asking has absence weighing in on the etiquette of disappearance and has its golden yawn gasping for shortness of breath. I don’t know. We might just be from those kissed places that a landless god won’t wash. Invented. In the way a ghost might fall asleep to the same repeating blip from an unfixed radar. In the way that same ghost elsewhere makes its own soul, then looks for it, then pictures it. Sees it twice from the same abandoned eye.

[Karlee · Rating 5 out of 5]

The collection was a beautiful exploration of adoption and identity and the definition of family. I think the framing that struck me the most was the juxtaposition of "gaining" family through finding knowledge through exploration of adoption history while also losing current family to age and illness. It was powerful in the way the tone and style left me feeling unrooted each time I read a section like I was also meant to be searching for something. A moving story that I would highly recommend.

[ayd · Rating 5 out of 5]

oh how i love john gallaher. favorites off the top of my head include: “as quentin tarantino’s torture americana”, “to be happy, they suggest”, “the world as itself”, “nest III”, and “the book of names.”