The Language of Grief

By Alex Gallo-Brown

"The Language of Grief," a collection of poems in seven parts, took its author seven years to complete. The poems chronicle the sudden loss of his father to illness and the subsequent effect the loss had on his family, community, and psyche. As Gallo-Brown writes in the introduction, "This is a story about grief. There are exhortations of love here and gasps of fear, flashes of self-discovery followed by descents into confusion and rage." His lyrical, often darkly humorous poems show the ways that grief can shatter us--and ways we put ourselves back together.

Alex Gallo-Brown was born and raised in Seattle and holds a BFA in creative writing from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Rumpus, Salon, The Nervous Breakdown, The Collagist, Everyday Genius, The Monarch Review, and elsewhere. He has worked as a labor organizer, a caregiver for people with disabilities, and a farmhand, among other occupations. He lives in Atlanta. Find him at www.alexgallobrown.com.

Praise for The Language of Grief

"Alex Gallo-Brown's poems are the sad and beautiful tales of a lost son, lost father, and, yes, lost generation. But these poems are fun and smart. I love them."
-- Sherman Alexie, winner of the National Book Award

"The poet has lost his father, and the baffling, overwhelming grief is the sustained bass note under these songs of innocence and experience. To have arrived at his level of control while writing of a great blow, as well as of the uncontrollable plagues of youth—feverish loneliness, ecstasy shading into disillusion—is remarkable."
-- Valerie Trueblood, author of Search Party and Marry or Burn

"Grief isn't always about death, rather it's a fundamental part of living a rich, meaningful life. Alex Gallo-Brown understands this on a deep level, and his masterful, lyrical poems convey the sad beauty of letting go."
-- Claire Bidwell Smith, author of The Rules of Inheritance

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex Gallo-Brown
• Release date: Jun 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310609237

Alex Gallo-Brown

Alex Gallo-Brown is the author of The Language of Grief (2012), a collection of poems, and Relief (2014), a chapbook. His essays, poems, stories, and interviews have appeared in print and online at The Rumpus, Salon, The Good Men Project, The Collagist, Fanzine, The Nervous Breakdown, and The Brooklyn Rail, among other publications. He is the recipient of a 2013-2014 Walthall fellowship for emerging artists in Atlanta. Find him at www.alexgallobrown.com.

Book preview

I never meant to write grief poems. I never meant to write any poems, in fact. Over the last seven years I have identified as a poker player, a student of creative writing, a restaurant worker, a caregiver for people with disabilities, a labor organizer, a literary essayist, and an apprentice farmer. Almost never, however, have I identified as a poet. The reasons for this are complicated, I am sure, not least to do with the paucity of poetry in our culture. (Try telling someone you have just met that you write poems; now watch them glaze over with incomprehension and embarrassment.) Mostly, though, I have been reluctant to identify as a poet because I have never really felt like one. The version of myself that walks and talks and moves around in the world seems very different from the one that summons poetry.

Still, the poems have come and continue to come, in bursts of creative energy that leave me disoriented on the page. Most often, I am surprised at what gets put down there. Sometimes I am ashamed.

Even still, the poems assembled here do, I believe, coalesce into something almost resembling a narrative. This is a story, finally, about grief. There are exhortations of love here and gasps of fear, flashes of self-discovery followed by descents into confusion and pain. Apparently I have been grieving for longer than I have even known.

When we talk about grief, it is usually the intense feelings following the loss of a loved one to which we refer. And for good reason. Losing a partner, a parent, a friend, or a child can be spectacularly painful for those involved.

I would like to complicate such a conception of grief, however, to include all feelings that result from serious loss in a person’s life. We can feel grief when we leave one living situation for another. We can feel it after a longtime partner leaves us, or after we begin a new relationship (grief for our solitude, in the latter case). We can feel it when our career path changes, or when our values gradually shift. We can feel it when we are degraded by our work (grief for our own lost dignity), after we enter a shopping mall (grief for the commodification of our objects), or in the middle of a cheap and processed meal (grief for the poverty of our food). In the America I know grief is omnipresent.

It is particularly troubling, then, that our capacity to talk about grief, to process it in some socially significant way, is as poor as it is. With so few common rituals to turn to, diverted by our innumerable screens, many of us