As Long as We're Here

Joel Brouwer

• Publisher: Four Way Books
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN: 9781961897786
• eBook ISBN: 9781961897793
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

As Long as We're Here is an off-key anthem, a funhouse mirror held up to our dumpster fire era. Chronically online, distracted and distracting, with too many browser tabs open at once, attentive to everything and focused on nothing, Brouwer delights in the late capitalist absurdities of sleeping apps and internet dance crazes, and riffs on the argot of the group chat and the team meeting. These slippery poems both suffer from and revel in their ADD. Their shifts are as fleet as our news feeds, their serpentine sentences leap from barroom jests to high modernist splendor and back. But the book is not all fun and games. Dreamy tales of edgelords and loyalty oaths often arrive at places of surprising pathos and beauty. Mortality gnaws at the narrators of these poems, and political unrest lurks in the background. Still, a sense of solidarity—that we of the title, a recurring pronoun throughout—keeps despair at bay. Indeed, As Long as We're Here is a book of intimacy, of the coterie. Friends and lovers people its lyrics, which often feel like late-night hang sessions with eccentric, wise-cracking pals. Full of wry wisdom and lush music, As Long as We're Here knows what to do with a diminished thing: make it sing.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• An Onset of Palsy
• Velleities of May
• 1000 Hours of Staring
• College Days
• Screenshot
• If I Recall Correctly
• Girl with Gazelle
• Wrapped in Black and Yellow
• It’s Been a Real Rollercoaster
• Smash or Pass
• Fancy That
• After Overhearing a Confidential Conversation
• Purchasing Power
• So-Called Vernacular Architecture
• Sonnet Found in a Borrowed Book
• Brown Study
• Low and Away
• No Big Mystery
• Saturn Return
• Averaged Totals
• An Ambulance Down in the Valley
• Fragment Found in a Ballot Box
• Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There
• Sundowner
• Maecenas in Winter
• Reacharound
• Ceteris Paribus
• The Helmet of Mambrino
• Beer Money
• Patriarchal
• Penultimate Round of Approvals
• Fully Deductible
• Like a Lichen on the Rock
• On Permanent Loan
• Phony Assignment
• Movie Night
• L’esprit de l’escalier
• Overruled
• The Kuleshov Effect
• For You
• Busy Weekend
• Staying Home to Listen to Music
• El último
• Acknowledgments and Notes
• About the Author