Here on Earth (New York Quarterly Books) by Tony Gloeggler
Tony Gloeggler’s Here on Earth (New York Quarterly Books) is a collection that refuses distance. These poems don’t observe life so much as remain pressed up against it—breath, illness, memory, regret, tenderness—all unfolding in real time. What emerges from the selected poems is not a grand statement about mortality or working-class endurance, but something more intimate and unsettling: a record of a life lived in proximity to fragility, where love is inseparable from caretaking, and memory is as physical as pain.
The emotional center of the book is the poet’s mother, whose decline threads through multiple poems, especially “Again,” “Hoping,” and “Still Alive.” In “Again,” the poem pivots on a moment that never quite arrives cleanly: the mother’s admission that she is afraid to die. The syntax stretches, delays, accumulates errands and gestures—cutting cheesesteak, arranging fries, managing the logistics of care—until the emotional truth surfaces almost casually. The speaker’s response, “me too mom,” is devastating precisely because it resists consolation. Gloeggler excels at these anti-revelations, where the expected emotional climax collapses into something blunt, shared, and unresolved.
“25 Years” extends this familial meditation backward, revisiting the father’s death with a mixture of clarity and evasion. The poem’s second half lists the father’s virtues—work ethic, generosity, toughness—but halts before the full accounting: “I could tell you as many bad things too. / Just not right now, OK?” This withholding is crucial. Gloeggler’s poetics are built not on confession alone, but on the ethics of what cannot yet be said. Memory is active, selective, and sometimes protective.
Physical vulnerability—whether through illness, disability, or aging—is another constant. In “68,” the speaker’s attempt to return to basketball becomes a confrontation with bodily betrayal. The language shifts from kinetic memory (“crossovers, pump fakes”) to a grotesque present (“each leg feels like a sack of rotting meat”). Yet even here, the poem resists despair. The imagined act of inflating a basketball and returning to the court carries a fragile hope, a desire to reclaim—even symbolically—the self that once moved freely.
Gloeggler’s long experience working with developmentally disabled individuals shapes some of the collection’s most complex and compassionate poems. “Autistic Evening Routine,” “Hoping,” and “All of Them” reveal a world structured by repetition, unpredictability, and deep, often unreciprocated care. In “Hoping,” the parallel between caring for Lee, a child with profound needs, and the poet’s mother is quietly devastating. The realization that Lee’s gestures of connection are “the most [he] would ever give” becomes a lens through which the speaker understands caregiving itself: an act stripped of expectation, sustained moment by moment.
What distinguishes these poems is their refusal to sentimentalize either suffering or virtue. Gloeggler allows irritation, boredom, and even resentment to coexist with love. In “All of Them,” the speaker admits to being bored by one resident, repelled by another, before recognizing himself among them: “Like me, like you, like everyone we know.” This leveling impulse—collapsing distinctions between caregiver and cared-for, able-bodied and disabled—runs throughout the collection.
The poems also explore loneliness and missed intimacy with an unflinching honesty. “Home Movie” and “Lonely” revisit past relationships not as nostalgic refuges but as sites of incompletion. The speaker’s inability to fully inhabit sexual or emotional connection—his sense that something is “seriously wrong”—is rendered without self-pity. Instead, these poems dwell in the awkward, often painful gap between desire and action, memory and possibility.
Formally, Gloeggler favors long, prose-like lines that accumulate detail and defer closure. The diction is plainspoken, often conversational, but carefully modulated. Profanity appears not for shock but as an extension of voice, grounding the poems in a distinctly working-class New York sensibility. The effect is a kind of narrative lyricism, where story and reflection are inseparable.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Here on Earth is its insistence on continuity. Life does not resolve; it persists. Caregiving continues, routines repeat, memories resurface. Even moments of imagined escape—romantic reunions, athletic revival—are framed as temporary, conditional. The final emotional register is neither despair nor redemption, but endurance.
Gloeggler’s achievement lies in his ability to render that endurance without abstraction. These poems stay close to the body—to feeding, cleaning, lifting, waiting—and in doing so, they honor the unremarkable acts that define a life. The result is a collection that feels earned rather than constructed, lived rather than written: a testament to the difficult, ongoing work of being here on earth.
Here on Earth by Tony Gloeggler is available at https://www.amazon.com/Here-Earth-Tony-Gloeggler/dp/1630451096
While a resident of New York City, Richard Modiano became active in the literary community connected to the Poetry Project where he came to know Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs and Ted Berrigan. In 2001 he was a programmer at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, joined the Board of Trustees in 2006, and from 2010 to 2019, he served as Executive Director. The Huffington Post named him as one of 200 people doing the most to promote poetry in the United States. Modiano is the winner of the 2022 Joe Hill Prize for labor poetry and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
