Find Me In the Feral Pockets
:
Poems from the Gowanus Interregnum
provides an amphibious tour of a peculiar New York City neighborhood in transition with the Gowanus Canal reflecting hardships and catharsis. Poet Brad Vogel paddles through pollution, relationships, environmental concerns, accreted layers of history, and even humor as he distills Gowanus into a collection of unique, sometimes bracing poems. The collection captures the values of "the unplanned place" in the urban landscape and the individual mind of a city dweller. A quirky, flood-prone realm on the brink, Gowanus comes to life through an array of lenses, from floating condoms to street-end weeds, from resilient fish to unknown organisms in the polluted muck, a weird world is found to be worth noticing, worth loving. The book features an interesting, if not unique, element: a poetic heat map that indicates the precise geographic origins of each poem in the collection in the context of the neighborhood.