The debut chapbook by Brooklyn poet Gerald Wagoner explores the early pandemic lockdown in a poem for every day of April 2020.
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During the month of April 2020, Gerald Wagoner took long nighttime walks around his Gowanus Canal community in Brooklyn, notebook in hand, as he jotted down his observations of people, places, and things in the eerie quiet of that first pandemic spring. “The only other people out were the occasional dog walkers,” Gerald told me. “The silence was palpable.” Gerald’s notes were highly sensory and observational. Each entry had a date, a time, and reference to the weather. The result is A Month of Someday, a collection made up of a poem for every day from April 1 to May 1, 2020.
Gerald Wagoner is the quintessential Indolent Books author. I started Indolent Books in 2015 as a home for poets over 50 without a first book. Indolent also publishes non-first books, and books by poets under 50. But the founding mission was, and remains, around poets over 50 without a first book.
What makes someone the quintessential Indolent author? Our poets over 50 without a first book tend to be people who have always been poets at heart, and were even poets in fact, but did not publish a book in their (relative) youth because life intervened in one way or another. In Gerald’s case, he loved language, literature, and poetry, and he also loved the visual arts. Gerald earned a BA in creative writing at the University of Montana, and followed that up with an MFA in sculpture from SUNY Albany.
In 1982, Gerald moved to Brooklyn, where he exhibited widely and soon became a teaching artist with Studio in a School, a visual arts organization that sends working artists into the New York City public schools. In 1988, Gerald went to work for the NYC Board of Ed, teaching high school English until he retired in 2017. That’s when he started writing poetry again.
As is clear to anyone who looks at one of his massive plate steel sculptures, Gerald is not one to shy aways from a challenge. In a few short years, he honed his poetic craft, and started racking up journal publications. In 2018, as part of a residency from the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club, Gerald partnered with longtime friend and fellow artist, Robert Gould, on an installation called On the Tides of Time, pairing Gould’s large-scale paintings with Gerald’s poems about the life, death, and rebirth of the Superfund-sited Gowanus Canal.
Gerald Wagoner is, you might say, an emerging poet with a vengeance. His incubation has been long, but he has now burst forth from his poetic chrysalis with deftness and elan. A Month of Someday will not be Gerald’s last poetry collection—not by a long shot! But you have the opportunity to make it his first, and to bring it into the world with the power and gusto it so richly deserves.
Praise for A Month of Someday
Because A MONTH OF SOMEDAY doesn’t waste a word, I’m tempted to quote lavishly from these wry, economical, limpidly attentive urban observations recorded during the most frightening month early in the pandemic. But I won’t. Every poem here merits quoting—and rereading. Gerald Wagoner’s eye misses nothing; his quiet voice is a chorus of one that reaches beyond self to his city. This is a book that remembers, and also a book to remember. Read it.
—Rachel Hadas
Strolling daily through altered and stunned Brooklyn neighborhoods in A MONTH OF SOMEDAY, Gerald Wagoner is our perceptive weatherman and curious guide to the monstrous first April of New York City’s pandemic, where “Mary Shelley, anime monster in her pocket, gathers fresh flowers to toss down a well.” Wagoner maps the missing city and its transformed condition that includes us, in reverent lyrics and vivid micro narratives, with a keen and attentive negative capability.
—Amy Holman