Find Me In the Feral Pockets: Poems from the Gowanus Interregnum, Brad Vogel

Description

Find Me In the Feral Pockets: Poems from the Gowanus Interregnum
Paperback – February 29, 2024
by Brad Vogel (Author)

In Find Me In the Feral Pockets, Brad Vogel invites readers into one of New York City’s strangest and most mesmerizing landscapes: the liminal, ever-evolving neighborhood surrounding the Gowanus Canal. Through sharp-eyed, deeply felt poems, Vogel transforms this polluted waterway—long infamous yet fiercely beloved—into a rich terrain of contradiction and revelation. Here, hardship and catharsis shimmer on the same slick surface; beauty and decay coexist in gritty, undeniable intimacy.

Paddling through the canal and its edges, Vogel charts an “amphibious tour” of a neighborhood in transition, tracing the layers of environmental ruin, industrial history, climate threat, and emotional entanglement that define Gowanus. From floating condoms to resilient fish, from street-end wildflowers to mysterious organisms dwelling in the toxic muck, he finds a world that is unplanned, unruly, vulnerable, and entirely alive. His poems distill both the absurdity and the tenderness of urban life, revealing how even the most neglected spaces shape—and mirror—the inner landscapes of the people who move through them.

A standout feature of the book is its poetic “heat map,” a visual guide marking the exact geographic origin of each poem within the neighborhood. This cartographic-poetic hybrid underscores the collection’s deep sense of place, rooting the work in specificity while illuminating a broader meditation on how we inhabit environments under threat.

Quirky, bracing, and unexpectedly full of love, Find Me In the Feral Pockets captures the spirit of a realm on the brink—a place that shouldn’t thrive but somehow does, and a poet determined to honor its strange, feral beauty.