Falling Brick Kills Local Man

by Mark Kraushaar

Falling Brick Kills Local Man is a daring and inventive collection of narrative poems rich with thoughtful and precise language. Mark Kraushaar writes about what moves him, whether that is the war in Iraq, the notion of synchronicity, the retelling of children’s stories, or a problem of recollection. Often inspired by newspaper stories or witnessed scenes, these poems are a refreshingly honest exploration of our interconnected and multifaceted world.

 

 

Finalist, Poetry, Midwest Book Awards

Genres: Poetry

83 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Mark Kraushaar was born in Washington DC and grew up outside Boston in Concord, Massachusetts. He attended Marlboro College in Vermont, where he studied literature and writing, worked briefly as a high school English teacher, then as a cab driver in Boston. After this, he moved to London for two years and travelled in Europe. Back in the States he lived for a time in New York City and again in Boston. He attended trade school in Louisville, Kentucky, worked as a welder on the coal and grain barges on the Mississippi and then moved to the state of Mississippi, where he worked as a pipe welder at Ingalls Shipbuilding. He moved to Wisconsin after two years at the shipyard, worked in construction as a pipe welder but found this was “definitively not my dish” and so went to nursing school in Madison, Wisconsin. He has worked as an RN in Madison since the mid-80s. His work has appeared in the Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Alaska Review, Gettysburg Review, as well as Best American Poetry, and the website Poetry Daily. He has been featured in the Missouri Review as well as Michigan Quarterly and has been a recipient of Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Award. A previous collection, Falling Brick Kills Local Man, was a finalist for the May Swenson Award, the Juniper Prize and the Walt Whitman Award, and was published in 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press as winner of the Felix Pollak Prize.

Reviews

[Ian Sims · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first book of poetry I've read by Mark Kraushaar and I'll admit that I selected it off a shelf based on the title. There were some real gems in here, including the poem I've added below ("House of Chong") and the titular poem, but I started to get a little tired of Kraushaar's non-committal literary voice by the end of the collection. As an example, here are a few selections, several of which come from poems I adored:

Meanwhile, and by this I mean
at the same time precisely,
in Seoul or Arena or Kiev
another man nods yes

It could have been Armstrong or Sinatra or
Dorsey, I don't know.

In such a way,
in your version,
inevitably as the soft news
passed through stems
your life speaks as well:
planets, liquor, envy, round vegetables,
even love.

Independently, I find this listing, non-committal, whatever-you-want-to-call-it strategy where Kraushaar paints an image to be wonderful. However, and this may be due to having read this in a single sitting, by the final page of the collection, I was beginning to feel like this was an overused technique. But who knows? Maybe I'm just irritable since some gross little kids got me sick at a holiday party earlier this week.

House of Chong
Frank, pay the goddam bill,
she said, drunk and easily
over eighty. Then she sat down
again, hard. She’d been
to the Ladies for the third time
at least, not that all this affected me
exactly or that those beat
white mismatched shoes and three
coats and elegant hat and tool kit
changed anything either.
It wasn’t that. Also,
it wasn’t the way her male friend
stood there just clearly wild about her
or the way the Chinese cook stood
smiling himself despite two
returned fried rices and a spilled
scotch and all that shouting. He
knew something, yes,
but that night I paid up and stepped
outside and there were city noises
far off and the lightest breeze ever.
I mean, I left so oddly sad
and happy both that night. Really,
it was more that I’d looked up.
It was more that I’d stopped
eating and reading and just looked up.

[Rochelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found this gem on the shelf amongst other gems in the waiting lounge of my car repair! Oh so luminous and wonderful.......

[Conor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this.

There were some dull moments, but then bits like this:

"Hadn't I, Didn't I, deserve an audience?
On that clear night
I stood beneath the wish-worn stars,
the soft-talking maple, the thinnest
scarves of stray thought passing around me,
and I began to pray:
Hello, you don't know me, but..."