Poems & Pie – My Life in Brutalist Architecture by John Gallaher
June 25 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
The Writer's Block
519 S 6th St Ste 100, Las Vegas, NV 89101
Poems & Pie – My Life in Brutalist Architecture by John Gallaher
About the Event
The Poems & Pie Book Club will discuss works of contemporary and classic poetry and enjoy pie. The group welcomes anyone with an interest in learning more about poetry—no prior knowledge required.
As John Gallaher prefaces this book, “It should have been an easy story to sort out, but it took fifty years.” My Life in Brutalist Architecture confronts the truth of the author’s adoption after a lifetime of concealment and deceptions with lucid candor, startling humor, and implacable grief. Approaching identity and family history as a deliberate architecture, Gallaher’s poems illuminate how a simple exterior can obscure the structural bricolage and emotional complexity of its inner rooms. This collection explores — and mourns — the kaleidoscopic iterations of potential selves as prismed through our understanding of the past, a shifting light parsed by facts, memories, and a family’s own mythology.
Equal parts reckoning and apologia, My Life in Brutalist Architecture disrupts the notion that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, attesting to the irrevocable harm of silence, while offering mercy in its recognition of our guardians as deeply flawed conduits of care. Referencing Vitruvius’s foundational elements of architecture (firmitas, utilitas, and venustas, or solidity, usefulness, and beauty), Gallaher fuses an elegy and an ode to family when he writes “that in the third principle of architecture, / they bathe you and feed you. You won’t remember. // And they know this.” Gallaher’s lyricism encapsulates this, humanity’s consummate tragedy and profoundest grace — that love, even when forgotten, persists.