by Desiree’ Johnson
Joel Brouwer’s work in And So reveals the world as false constructed reality. His poems draw attention to the stage that everyday people struggle to perform on. The expectations associated with these roles and the disappointments therein are reflected within the strained interpersonal relationships that the reader witnesses. Brouwer calls attention to how lost we are, in need of certain stage directions to play through life.
The poem “White Suit” highlights the expectations of roles, showing a movie being filmed on a street in Paris:
Passers-by were at
first confused by the commotion,
but then, when they had
understood, would tuck a curl
behind an ear, stand
straighter, put on lipstick before
passing in front of the camera.
The comparison of the reality of the everyday to the portrayal of the reality of the movie set is unsettling. Everyone fit into their roles fluidly moving in front of the camera to become “archetypal feature-film Parisians” for a moment.
This acting through life results in weakness within relationships. In “The Weakness,” a poem about morel hunting divided into sections; the first section ends with the overconfidence of fresh love “Let no one suggest they lacked directions.” This young passion is contrasted with the last section ending with the morels as “withered / penises,” and the male character “distracted and sick”:
She said this could be a symptom. His hands
weren’t his. The votives and textbooks
on her dressers struck him first as symbols
and then as conflicting instructions. He thought
if he could follow them he would be fine.
This breakdown of character occurs throughout the book. The players begin to resist their roles, quietly self-destructing.
In “A Rehearsal,” the male character cannot perform, “and in the wings his line stalls in his throat.” Even the animals are aware of the dreary letdown of this play. Cats “slump along the vast windowsill / as if drugged.” In “The Other Half’s Dark,” we see the banality of the quotidian exemplified in a zombie-like suburbia: “joggers, the sparse brown lawns,” “The husband / thinks he will clip his fingernails,” “The rubbery bird / beneath the pecan tree yesterday is / gone today” and “The puppy sniffs the dry, leaf-choked gutter / like a bored sommelier.”
The players are in motion, the stage is set, and the characters are losing heart. So many of the poems show vivid desire, and then resignation. The characters play their parts half-heartedly, loves becoming unfamiliar and typecast. In “And the Ship Sails On,” the machinery of the ship echoes the blackness and the hunger felt underneath the clean, crisp demeanor of a couple: “she regarded him / beautifully but without feeling” while,
Deep in the ship’s belly
pistons churned and sailors fed
the boilers’ roar with coal. On deck
just the engine’s dull thrum and
a faint click as the woman sets her ring
on the cool white lip of the sink.
The machinery of the ship is loud and demands to be fed, but one wonders about the lost characters throughout Brouwer’s poems; they are starving. Hungry like the cormorant, which “poor fishermen knot rope” around it’s neck “so it can’t swallow the big fish it catches and instead / brings them back to the boat. The bird lives on minnows. Minnows / are still fish, he said. And sufficient. For all we know delicious.”
