paper • 112 pages • 17.95
ISBN: 978-1-961897-78-6
eISBN: 978-1-961897-79-3
March 2026 • Poetry
As Long as We’re Here is an off-key anthem, a funhouse mirror held up to our dumpster-fire era. Chronically online, distracted and distracting, with too many browser tabs open at once, attentive to everything and focused on nothing, Brouwer delights in the late capitalist absurdities of sleeping apps and internet dance crazes, and riffs on the argot of the group chat and the team meeting. These slippery poems both suffer from and revel in their ADD. Their shifts are as fleet as our news feeds, and their serpentine sentences leap from barroom jests to high modernist splendor and back. But the book is not all fun and games. Dreamy tales of edgelords and loyalty oaths often arrive at places of surprising pathos and beauty. Mortality gnaws at the speakers of these poems, and political unrest lurks in the background. Still, a sense of solidarity—that we of the title, a recurring pronoun throughout—keeps despair at bay. Indeed, As Long as We’re Here is a book of intimacy, of the coterie. Friends and lovers people its lyrics, which often feel like late-night hang sessions with eccentric, wise-cracking pals. Full of wry wisdom and lush music, As Long as We’re Here knows what to do with a diminished thing: make it sing.
Smash or Pass
Did you notice one of the extras in that hospital scene
kept looking into the camera, as if a clearer future
was coming right at him? Surely by now I’ve forgotten
more than I know. I coddle my orchids and rewind
my shows. When animals stand still in a sunny pasture
I assume they’re thinking of evening. You’ve never
been one to push a song on anyone, at least that’s been
my experience, or to label the system of attachment
that has grown, over these last weeks, as complex
and hot as an anthill. The heap of unprimed canvas
on the studio floor reminds me of a Buddha
in a temple with no roof. Yet I love that you cherish
your weakness and mine. I guess most of the livestock
are happy with grass. Smash or pass. Smash or pass.
In these new poems, Joel Brouwer deploys his trademark deadpan humor to jackhammer the rotting foundations of our contemporary idiom. I have long turned to Brouwer, a poet whose intelligence I revere (and fear!), to be reminded of why one must write. In As Long as We’re Here, I find my most persistent questions answered: how will poetry accommodate a rhetoric born of capitalism magnified and distorted by our digital age? When do 21st century platitudes (attitudes) begin to behave like mannequins brought to life, birthing their words out of our own mouths? Have we been talking to ourselves all along? Such distressing preoccupations are the mindstuff of this talky, unnerving, and riotous book.
o ephebes, no, you really cannot buy what a serious life of poetry (yes, precisely nothing like what you imagine) gets you. but take a long look, cause these poems are all that. joel brouwer’s bourrée is so fast and so fine; do you hear the form and see the meaning? the shine off his cherries and the sparkle of his flies. yeah, he’s kinda gone electric, but you are still on his old excellently-fabricked (partially antimacassared) couch, and you are still really enjoying yourself, crying. these poems will fill your room and make you want to duel.
Almost as soon as I began this book, I burst out laughing: “The great apes fear rivers.” The seriousness of this fact, stated with such plain elegance. If you think this is funny, then this is the book for you, an amazing mixture of high and colloquial dictions woven into an electrifying blanket. Not an electric blanket, that’s different. Brouwer’s wordplay is gleeful, but he isn’t letting us off lightly; the absurdities herein are entirely nonfictional, for we live in an absurd land of edgelords and doomscrolling teens and they are all here in As Long as We’re Here.