Off Message

Joel Brouwer

In meditations on everything from Marx to the Marianas Trench, Off Message probes the troubling corners of our globalized lives with humor, pathos, and verve. Political without being preachy, these poems are unafraid to implicate themselves: like us, their speakers are part of the problem, and their struggles highlight the absurdities of broadband capitalism. What should we make of televised warfare, revitalized totalitarianism, and spectacular environmental degradation? Which pages should we highlight in our history books? Off Message wrestles with these questions by overlaying the near and the far, the lyric and encyclopedic. Each poem is a mixtape, an abandoned essay, a satire of modern conscience. Veering from the Deepwater Horizon disaster to Kasparov’s chess match against Deep Blue, they revel in the sights and sounds of information overload even as they yearn for knowledge and connection in our hyper-mediated present.

from “Observations in a Port City,” from Off Message:

…Of bodies

changed to other forms I sing. The palazzos

of the oligarchs are now the palazzos

of the oligarchs: Paribas, DB, Credit Suisse.

Marco Polo dictated his travels

in the prison of the Casa delle Compere

di San Giorgio, Europe’s oldest bank,

so both interest and China were invented there.

It’s the port authority now, of course.

A young woman helped a blind man

navigate the piazza. It was either kindness

or her job. Everything is changed; nothing

ceases. The dead woman who ran for it.

The dead woman who got too old. The dead woman

weeping at the gangplank to the Tunis ferry

with a dirty peony of Euros but no passport.

I cannot recommend the tour of Columbus’s house.

The price of admission is extortionate

and also he never lived there. He’s crossing

borders drawn in the air. He speaks

every language. Everything is translated;

nothing signifies. …