Brand New Spacesuit

John Gallaher’s most recent poetry collection, In A Landscape was published by BOA Editions in 2014. He is also the author, together with G.C. Waldrep, of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (BOA, 2011), which was written in collaboration almost completely through email. His poetry collection, The Little Book of Guesses (Four Way Books, 2007), was the recipient of the Levis Poetry Prize. Gallaher is currently the co-editor of The Laurel Review and The Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics, and is an assistant professor of English at Northwest Missouri State. He lives in Maryville, MO.

“Read these poems in succession and at the pace they create and you’ll have proof that art lets us, wants us, to read another’s mind. John Gallaher’s poetry is relentlessly alive. Moving with candor, humor, speed, and with more gravity than youth can afford, Gallaher has voiced a found and juxtaposed domain, layered and moving along the flotsam of common culture and the axis of family ‘as if everything here is here,’ where the remembered world waits inside of things, or behind, or above, or below them. This is a grown man’s book of relations. It is extraordinary.”―Kathleen Peirce, author of Vault“One swell thing about living on this planet is how it turns so fast everybody is connected to it and each other and not drifting alone through space except possibly in our own minds. The poems in Brand New Spacesuit are similarly centripetally swell. They turn and they turn and it’s a wild ride that leaves me (and I suspect will also leave you) feeling more connected to the minutiaes and struggles and pleasures and loves of this life on earth. Reading this book feels like some cosmic bang is conjuring up gravity inside your own brain, but whoa it was actually just John Gallaher who did that and he only used his words.”―Kathryn Nuernberger, author of Rue