Here on Earth

Tony Gloeggler is a narrative poet, and in his new book Here on Earth, he tells stories in a voice you could hear in a Queens diner or sitting on a Brooklyn stoop, stories that reveal secrets and attempt to figure out his place in the world, what he did to get here. The tone is conversational and musical with slanting rhymes and shifting rhythms that make the poems easy to read. The book covers the last five years like a diary or memoir, helping to take care of his dying mother as well as the poet's relationship with his ex-girlfriend's autistic son, Jesse. Gloeggler weaves themes that slip in and out to build the narrative: his forty years running a group home for the developmentally challenged-a job he loved and one of the only places he felt he belonged, Covid, his complex relationship to writing poetry for decades, Brian Wilson, Earl The Pearl, Nestor Cortez on the mound in the boogie down Bronx, a close friend's suicide, memories of ex-girlfriends, and the facts of steadily aging. Comparing past to present, he tries to get somewhat right with himself.