Brand New Spacesuit

In Brand New Spacesuit, John Gallaher writes with honesty, humor, and tenderness about what fades and what remains. These poems offer snapshots of the poet’s memories of his adoption and childhood, his father’s heart attacks, his mother’s progressing Alzheimer’s disease and stroke, raising his own children, and his reflections on the complex mysteries of the universe within everyday moments. With exquisite attention to detail, Gallaher captures the losses, anxieties, and possibilities that come with caring for one another.

Praise for John Gallaher

“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