By Kevin Prufer

For two decades now, John Gallaher has been quietly writing some of the most pleasurable and compelling poetry in the United States, including the books The Little Book of Guesses (Four Way Books, 2007), In a Landscape (BOA, 2014), and Brand New Spacesuit (BOA Editions, 2020). In his newest collection, My Life in Brutalist Architecture (Four Way Books, 2024), he is at his very best.

The book begins with a quote from Ruth Graham: “There is something temptingly tidy about the idea of adoption: a family with extra love and resources meets a child in desperate need of both.” From there, through meditations on his own adoption in 1968, Gallaher goes on to show just how untidy his life and thoughts on the subject are. But there’s nothing dogmatic here, nothing sentimental. Gallaher offers no lessons for readers and comes to no solutions. Rather, in poem after poem, he explores the subject with complexity and inquisitiveness, his mind shuffling through his own experiences, memories, suppositions. A photo of himself as a baby removed from its frame for the first time reveals his birth name written on the back. What might the poet have become had he kept that name? Where would he have gone? Is the name dead, or does it belong to some other version of himself, a version he might consult for guidance? “My fear says / these people don’t love me,” Gallaher writes. “They adopted me by mistake.” In poem after poem, the poet offers readers not just a meditation on the complexities of adoption, but on the variations of the idea of the self, on the slipperiness of identity, personality, and all our passages through years. “What,” he asks at one point, “does the self consist of? // The theme is time. The theme is unspooling.”

Though these poems in and of themselves, one after the other, are consistently impressive and skillful—Gallaher has an easy style, a voice that almost always begins casually, as of one friend talking to another, before falling into complexity and ambivalence—it is the collection as a total work of art that impresses me. In poem after poem, Gallaher creates something I can only describe as the cousin of memoir, offering us, in bits and pieces, an almost full story and an attempt at an accounting for the adopted self, the self made incoherent and polyvalent. A birth father dies in a car accident, an adopted family becomes estranged from the birth mother (who was also a cousin). A father becomes

gravely ill. Other children are born and flourish; they play soccer and grow into adolescence. At the same time, evidence of a forgotten early childhood accrues, and the anxieties and uncertainties of the present find some of their sources. “What do I say?” Gallaher asks in one poem. “That I got cold once when I was a child, and never got warm?” Or, elsewhere, “‘Where did my family go?’ the adopted child asks. / ‘I am your family,’ distance replies.”

But to call this book simply an extended meditation on adoption is to do Gallaher’s work a grave disservice. It is that, but it is also much more than that. It is a book about the construction and deconstruction of the myth of the self, about the formation and transformation of identity through knowledge, experience, history, and time. In a voice that seems at once casual and intimate—“Life was rough for a lot of people in 1794,” begins one poem, or “I’m called up for jury duty. It’s weird how things go”—Gallaher has constructed something that is grand, often melancholy, and, ultimately, humane.

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Kevin Prufer’s newest books are The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023) and Sleepaway: A Novel (Acre Books, 2024).