Gaylord Brewer

Description:

Baking a cake for Armageddon? Choosing the proper superpower? Finding solace in the imposed isolation of a world plague? In Before the Storm Takes It Away, Gaylord Brewer offers the answers. With topics as far-ranging as fondly recalled feasts in Italy to Charlton Heston’s Holy Bible, the pleasures of home birding to cooking with blood, simple bucolic pleasures to the deafening silence of lost friends, tales of beloved dogs to homoeroticism in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, to solar eclipses, gardening, and the rising death toll, Brewer steps away from poetry in these explosive and surprising explorations in brief nonfiction. What begins as a one-year experiment in genre becomes—when March 2020 arrives with its altered world—the author’s pandemic book. And more. From whence that trepidation throughout the winter, so unnerving at the time? Those dark prophecies? First scent of the storm. Nothing ever the same again.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Before the Storm Takes it Away is a testament to Gaylord Brewer’s ability to perfectly balance sincerity and humor, to find the strangest moments of personal history that somehow feel universal, and to fully consider the way the past and present and future all lay atop each other. There’s a lot here that reminds me of Padgett Powell’s love of formality and weirdness and linguistic flourishes. Brewer is a writer I love, and this unique book feels perfect to me.”
—Kevin Wilson

“During the pandemic, poet Gaylord Brewer hunkered down and got to work on short essays, each meticulously distilled, the result a culmination of friendly storytelling. There’s not an unwanted—or misplaced—word here, just care for life, his wife’s love, the occasional jaunts, books and teaching, parents, days of self-doubt followed by self-confidence, fruits and flowers from the garden, and a dog named Lucy at his side. He writes, ‘Let the remaining bees have their fun, too, a tumble in the pollen.’ That’s how I feel about this book. We all deserve a tumble in this golden pollen, then fly off to spread the word.”
—Gary Soto

Description:

Worship the Pig, Gaylord Brewer’s eleventh collection, is by the poet’s own definition, his “Americas book.” The migration begins from his Tennessee home to the Inside Passage of Alaska, then detours sharply south in a return to his beloved Costa Rica, then onward finally to the qualified paradise of Brazil’s Ilhabela. Brewer’s persistent obsessions—translating the call and challenge of the feral world, negotiating some truce with private ghosts—have never been more poignantly and sharply drawn. From chiseled lyrics to more expansive narratives—by turns reserved and raucous, always heartfelt and riveting—these new poems exhilarate. “No schematic for conquest, / no reckless conclusions, // no tenuous argument for connection / beyond the simple truth / of what accrues together.” At mid-career, the author called “the most natural poet in the country” by the Asheville Poetry Review continues to astonish.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Brewer’s a wonderful writer. I love his language. His eye. His attitude. His love for the world. And his poems do what they are meant to—they tell us to pause, to wake up, to see, to not squander the immensity and beauty and pain of our lives. We have to see it all, feel it all, he’s telling us, exhorting us, this heartbroken guide, this wise, sad, and funny poet.”—Jonathan Ames

“Gaylord Brewer is the most natural poet in the country.”—Asheville Poetry Review

Description:

Gaylord Brewer’s ninth collection of poetry, Country of Ghost, is by turns harrowing, haunted, and darkly humorous, and always deeply felt. When the figure Ghost appears ‘crossing a bridge in Spain, beside a river of the dead in France, across a midnight lake in Finland’ our speaker follows into a ravenous geography of longing and regret. In this astounding sequence of poems, who has summonsed whom? Brewer’s folie à deux explores both the worlds of the living and of the dead, worlds alternately aching and tender, and of the spirits caught between them.

Praise for Country of Ghost:

“Brewer writes as if a sly old god, wounded, lost and yet to renounce his magic. Ghost is a tour de force, part Caliban, part Ariel. Revenant, bored, hungry and amazed, Ghost will be with us ever hereafter.”—Robert Olmstead

“In this work of haunting, the possibilities for fruitful speculation and reflection are great. Gaylord Brewer’s poems in Country of Ghost are, at once, whimsical and deeply affecting in their pathos. The many ghosts that inhabit these poems contend with the conundrum of regret, and desire. It takes precise, well-modulated poetry that is alive with metaphor, wicked puns, image, and acutely observed detail to achieve what Brewer does in Country of Ghost.”—Kwame Dawes

“The world of feeling that Brewer so urgently describes is complicated and dynamic.”—Asheville Poetry Review

“The poems are eerie, achingly honest, conversational, and beautifully, darkly funny. Even if we are tempted to turn away from the rotting, breaking, bruised, and bleeding body, we are drawn in by the human need, the fragility, the nostalgia, the bittersweet longing of the speaker and his Ghost.”—Prick of the Spindle

“Brewer manages to masterfully balance the ordinary and extraordinary. The consequent contrasts and juxtapositions elevate both conditions of ‘ordinariness’ into a kind of equilibrium of the sublime. A trademark Brewer poem: craft, precision, self-analysis, humor, endurance, and a razor-sharp epiphany.”—The Evansville Review

Description:

From python hunting to Swami Keerti’s laughing meditation, from a death in the family to a burial on the rural acres where he’s stood his ground for a decade, Gaylord Brewer extends and explodes his career-long obsessions in Give Over, Graymalkin. This 8th collection of poems is a journal of loss and recovery, departure and surprising return, fleeting hours in a world diminished yet wondrous. Seas writhe with uncharted beasts. Horsemen gather, conflagrant beneath sword and cross. A daughter mounts a bicycle and a divorcé has the Harley delivered. From India to France to Spain, to the birdsong and day lilies of his unruly garden, Brewer continues as poetic conquistador mapping our longing, melancholy, and joy. With his characteristic wit and compassion, signature sculpted lines, and incantatory vigor, buried metaphors arise, holy days pass, toasts are raised, suns set over the desert of the animate dead. And the weary traveler? He approaches a dark corridor that may or may not be the way home.

Description:

Admirers of Gaylord Brewer’s dark and lyrical poetry will be delightfully stunned by this frantic detour into fiction, Octavius the 1st. Against a backdrop of dog walking and the bloated throat sac of the male siamang gibbon, through a gauntlet of good ole home cookin’ and the beatific lunch specials of the deli Cheeses Christ, to a soundtrack of soap operas and his own labored breathing, our protagonist, Octavius Trotter—lonely, hungry emperor of his mind—gambles the world’s meagre wages of love and longing. Jonathan Livingston Seagull meets The Bridges of Madison County. A dollop of John Kennedy Toole, a swizzle of Kingsley Amis, a sprinkle of Joyce. This alternately tender and brutally hilarious long novella emerges as something new, yet still contumaciously, caustically, inimitably Brewer. You are about to enter the “Otto Zone,” and life is about to change.

Description:

“Gaylord Brewer’s Barbaric Mercies is a book of extraordinary and delightful individuality. Alternately aggressive, outrageous, whimsical, and heartfelt, the poems are never predictable but always authentic. The author has such a genius for phrasing that there are many lines that make the reader stop and sigh or smile. A dark and delicious volume.”—Dana Gioia

“Barbaric Mercies, Mr. Brewer’s finest book of poems yet, seamlessly weaves a rich tapestry between landscape and longing, the poet’s big heart for language and his voracious appetite for making an impact on this life. This is a visionary collection, a lasting celebration to travel, leaving familiar turf for the unfamiliar, reveling in the simple beauty of words, gestures, images. If there is anything “barbaric” about this book and these poems, it is their striving to make an indelible impact on our consciousness as readers. Their taking hold of our imaginations and our moods hearkens back to Whitman’s “barbaric yawp,” that shouting/singing only the best poets seem to do rather effortlessly and with resounding ability.”—Virgil Suárez

Description:

This book is a brouhaha of fun and cleverness, where many of the poems are double-edged with humor and lasting wisdom. … These poems are delivered with the perfect clarity of everyday language.—The Cafe Review

Brewer is the most consistently dark-side-of-the-moon poet around…his…athletic style exactly suits the subject.—Hugh Fox, Small Press Review (Review of Presently A Beast)

I love the edgy laughter I hear on almost every page…There’s a ‘camaraderie of betrayal, lust, and song’.—David Kirby