words toward John Gallaher’s ‘My Life In Brutalist Architecture’ (Four Way Books, 2024)

My Life In Brutalist Architecture
John Gallaher, poems
Four Way Books, 2024

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.

~

reflection by Barton Smock