Brad Vogel’s Find Me in the Feral Pockets is a Whitmanic yawp for Gowanus. Often known as Lavender Lake, Gowanus became infamous as a dumping ground for local industries in the late 20th century and for the Mafia, if you believe the urban legends told of it. Now, it’s a Superfund site with a patron saint poet. Vogel’s poems come to life with glimpses of subway tracks above and the looming skyscrapers in the distance. The work ranges from pondering and playful to dark and depressive, as the voice takes careful stock of the strange hypnotic beauty of Gowanus, whether it’s roaming the streets on foot or floating down the canal via canoe. In “Black Mayonnaise” we see “Sick rainbows swirl/ Deep secrets bubble up/ Past percolating at low tide/ -And here I stand/ Bulkheaded, reeking/ Ancient timbers bowed/ A sponge garden/ With a runoff problem.” The stanza sets in motion so much of the volume’s energy; this place leads the voice deeper into itself. “I envy you, Gowanus/ We envy you, Gowanus/ You have an EPA/ To rid you of your PCBs/ A Superfund/ For your black mayonnaise/ Would that I could/ Would that we would/ Dredge ours up/ Omissions and failings/ Dredge ours up/ Half lives and toxic words/ Mix sludge with mountains/ With concrete/ To stabilize/ And cart it all away/ To some other state.” Poems like this one show the reciprocal relationship between speaker and setting—a longing to dredge up and cart away the toxins of the past to find some other state of being, to be strangely healed by regenerative powers of nature even in a state of pollution.
