Poetry. "When Henry David Thoreau wrote "The stars are the apexes to what triangles," I'm not so sure he had poetry collaborations in mind. And yet, when Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher say&mdash;though which one says it, or both, or none, I don't know&mdash;"Soon we wonder why we're both thinking about astronomy, and at exactly the same time," I begin to see by a sidereal light that collaboration at its best may be no more than two poets far apart gazing up at the same star's height, and what fills the triangle is the poem, otherwise known as art. These poems of "shared consciousness" make of individual life a jointly lived thing, so much so, that "we" hides in every "I" and "you." These collaborative poems gather us into their intimate community, and once within these pages, we glimpse what poetry might long have tried to teach us: how it is we go about learning to think, learning to see, learning to feel together."&mdash;Dan Beachy- Quick "One measure of the potency of literature is that its strangeness forces the reader to change her world to incorporate it, or to leave her world and join the one the writer has created. In this case, Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher's extraordinary domestic noir, GHOST / LANDSCAPE, creates both responses in me: transformation and relocation. Part of this book's wonderful strangeness, of course, arises from the nature of the collaboration between Darling and Gallaher, as their voices transform and relocate, blend and electrify into a single speaker (I, you, we) that longs for conversation: "I tried to phone you, but the snow went on for miles." This ache for articulation, for communion, is further complicated by the middle-class American ennui, dark humor, and matter-of-fact violence of the book. I finished GHOST / LANDSCAPE with the certainty that I have at least two voices, and one murder, inside me. This book will stay with me for a very long time."&mdash;Allison Benis White "Too often coauthored poetry books feel more like exercises than true, vital collections. Not so with Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher's GHOST / LANDSCAPE. These startling poems push against the boundaries of daily living through sustained attention and quiet articulation. "I'm busy looking at everything I'm looking at," Darling and Gallaher assert in one poem; in another they say of the suburban landscape in which many of these poems are set, "We can lift it up from the edges and look underneath. It's like looking into a mirror." Often the worlds of these poems feel dreamlike, populated at the perimeter with the ghosts of past and present as we eavesdrop on the only living voices merging, ultimately, into one human voice. And though the poems can be playful and self- reflexive&mdash;as one would expect from these two terrific postmodern poets&mdash;ultimately this is an intimate and surprisingly unified book of big ideas: "We all think we're having different lives, when really there's only one life and we're sharing it."&mdash;Wayne Miller "GHOST / LANDSCAPE reads like an intimate chat, except not the kind people have over tea. Maybe it's whiskey causing these emotional flare-ups ("They warned me about you"), these bouts of nostalgia ("You wake wondering where the antique chickens are"), these lamentations about lost love (count the number of missed phone calls throughout), these discomfiting confessions ("...I had always thought unhappiness would be easy"). The chemistry between these poets is electric; it lights up the page."&mdash;Diana Spechler

Ghost / Landscape

Literature & Fiction

Gallaher, John

Darling, Kristina Marie

Poetry

BlazeVOX Books

The Little Book of Guesses takes place in a 21st-century world where we’ve “accustomed ourselves to our customized dogs” and “honed the idea of ideas there in the obstacle race / that’ll never catch up.” But while it’s a world we’re not unfamiliar with―“in the New Age tourism is the answer”―Gallaher’s turn of speech is at once unique and exact, making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Serving as our escort through scenes including “The War President’s Afternoon Tea” and “A Moment in the Market of Moments,” Gallaher offers us several guidebooks: “to the Afterlife,” “to When Things Were Better,” and a “Pocket Guide to Some Foreign Country.” Even as these poems guess, they are confident in the form and lyricism. Abundant with comedy, they contain more than a dose of irony and cynicism, and still find room for the quiet anger of frustration, of knowing that what seems most surreal about this world often turns out to be reality itself.

The Little Book of Guesses

Four Way Books

Map of the Folded World, John Gallaher's third full-length collection, examines the eros and desperation of suburban America with the precision of a cartographer's eye. But, as its title suggests, it does so according to the polar opposite of convention. More concerned with subtext than narrative, often childlike in tone, and propelled by the logic of innocence, Gallaher's poems don't shy away from a bottom-line sensibility. This is a book filled with swimming pools and bridges, houses and families, the ordinary places, objects, and people that connect us. However, these same things are often misunderstood when it comes to their capacity for danger. Map of the Folded World brings us back to a territory that we never knew we had discovered, as it attempts to locate an ever-shifting present on an ever-changing field.

Map Of The Folded World (Akron Series in Poetry (Paperback))

University Of Akron Press

Falling somewhere between a "diary-poem," a "daybook," "autobiography-in-verse," and an "essay-poem," In a Landscape is noted poet and critic John Gallaher's most personal, straightforward, and revealing book yet. In lyric-prose that continuously circles the questions it raises, Gallaher sloughs off the garb of "poet" to address life questions in a way that few poets of his generation have been willing to risk. Family, death, adoption, children, parents, high school, music . . . Gallaher's subjects carry weight because of their absolute commonness.
John Gallaher is assistant professor of English at Northwest Missouri State University, and co-editor of the Laurel Review.

In a Landscape (American Poets Continuum)

BOA Editions, Ltd.

InBrand New Spacesuit, John Gallaher writes with honesty, humor, and tenderness about what fades and what remains.&nbsp;These poems offer snapshots of the poet's memories of his adoption and childhood, his father's heart attacks, his mother's progressing Alzheimer's disease and stroke, raising his own children, and his reflections on the complex mysteries of the universe within everyday moments.&nbsp;With exquisite attention to detail, Gallaher captures the losses, anxieties, and possibilities that come with caring for one another.

Brand New Spacesuit (American Poets Continuum, 179)

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.&nbsp;

My Life in Brutalist Architecture

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