Brand New Spacesuit

March 16, 2020
The thoughtful fourth book from Gallaher (In a Landscape) carefully balances an unspooling lyric style with sadness about the trappings of aging. “Like how grandma thought LOL meant Lots of Love,” he writes, but “now you’re the grandma. Great. But someone has to be the grandma.” This dense collection, whose 76 poems are made up of lines that nearly always reach to the right margin, searches for clarity amidst confusion and mental association: “I’m thinking a sequence/ is this worry I have, to happen in a line, to see it that way just to tell it.” The strongest moments emerge from
perceived connections. In “Like Mixing Chemicals Just to See What They Do,” Gallaher describes the relation of this style to his mother’s Alzheimer’s, observing that “as long as I have something/ to say, as long as I’m here saying it, then I have validation/ that I’m here, that I’ve not lost my mind.” Gallaher’s persistent questions reveal a mind that is both minute and momentous, logical and surprising.