WL Gertz’s Broken Dreams is an unflinching excavation of modern disillusionment, a collection that moves through landscapes both physical and psychological with a biting, restless energy. With a style reminiscent of Beat poetry’s raw spontaneity and the existential bleakness of postmodernism, Gertz crafts a world of fractured moments and transient encounters. This is poetry that refuses easy resolution, thriving instead in the ambiguity of memory, regret, and fleeting beauty. Wide readers of contemporary poetry will find themselves immersed in the text’s layered complexities, its feverish travelogue of cities, personal failures, and historical ghosts.
Gertz’s thematic concerns orbit around isolation, capitalism’s erosive touch, and the futility of human ambition. His vision is often nihilistic but never dull; each poem acts as a snapshot, a smudged Polaroid of lives lived on the margins. The fragmented structure and relentless rhythm of his lines reflect a consciousness always in motion, chasing meaning yet never settling. The poet captures the underbelly of existence with a sharp eye, presenting figures like Larry and Anita – trapped in cycles of ambition and betrayal – or the unnamed drifters whose lives are sketched with quick, brutal strokes.
One of the defining characteristics of Broken Dreams is its preoccupation with time’s ephemeral nature, particularly how past and present collapse into one another. This is evident in More Than Forty Years Ago, where the speaker drifts through a haze of European travel, illness, and self-destruction. The poem begins with the recollection of a hotel stay:
Carelessly enter the Old Bakery Hotel / Cough bad, three days without a meal / ‘cept for peas, vodka and more peas.
The repetition of ‘peas’ not only emphasises the monotony of survival but also underscores the way memory clings to the banal. The speaker’s illness, his disorientation, and his ultimate retreat into an almost surreal self-effacement ‘I walk quietly out of the Old Bakery Hotel / And throw my body into the oven / I am finally a loaf of bread‘ signal a surrender to time’s inevitability. The metaphor of transformation, of a human becoming an object, suggests the extent to which identity erodes under the weight of experience.
This sense of displacement is heightened in Paris in Blue, a poem that juxtaposes nostalgia with the violent absurdities of history. The speaker observes:
He’ll bleed red wine in the Café Le Ruth / for all the fucked-up people in this fucked-up world.
The colour imagery, red for wine, blue for Paris, infuses the poem with both patriotism and cynicism, suggesting a city that has become a mere backdrop for personal and political disillusionment. The paratrooper figure, who repeatedly remembers being dismissed in 1954 and 1968, embodies a past that refuses to stay buried, illustrating how history loops endlessly in cycles of betrayal and exile.
Gertz’s poetry frequently critiques the illusions of success and stability, particularly within the framework of the American Dream. Larry and Anita is a brutal deconstruction of a couple’s descent from youthful optimism into criminal desperation. Beginning with a deceptively lighthearted origin story ‘Met in Detroit / In Cobo Hall Arena on a Tuesday in June‘, the poem quickly unravels their fate. Larry, once a soldier, becomes a drug dealer; Anita, a mother, turns informant. Their trajectory, marked by betrayals and economic survivalism, is starkly summarised:
Larry’s borrowed gold paid for the flight / Anita’s baby was part of the deal.
This transactional view of human life, where even a child is currency, exposes the dark undercurrents of capitalist ambition. The poem’s clipped, factual tone mirrors the callousness of the world it describes, leaving the reader with an overwhelming sense of inevitability.
Similarly, I Quit My Job Today presents a speaker who has reached the end of capitalist endurance:
Poetry, like empty money markets / Is a disease of the body / Not the mind.
Here, poetry itself becomes a symptom of disillusionment, no longer an art form but an affliction. This inversion suggests that creativity has become tainted by economic despair, reinforcing the collection’s overarching sense of entrapment.
Throughout Broken Dreams, Gertz intertwines personal narratives with broader historical and political references, creating a collage of fragmented realities. The Air Breather exemplifies this technique, with its disjointed yet urgent lines:
Friday, heads feel warm, memories smile / the air breather looks for a crack in the wall.
The phrase ‘the air breather’ could symbolise survival in a suffocating world, someone desperate for escape but constantly faced with barriers. The rapid colour shifts ‘green, colour of fate, our noble cause / brown, the bamboo king awakens‘ create a kaleidoscopic effect, hinting at political unrest and social instability. The poem’s final lines: ‘To die for the spring is a mortal sin / To die for winter is the final solution‘ carry an ominous weight, invoking the cyclical nature of history’s brutality.
Likewise, Manifesto in the Second Color reads as a battle cry against modernity’s emptiness:
no need to long for a mythical golden past / when you can bank 24 hours a day.
Here, the poet dismantles the illusions of both nostalgia and progress, suggesting that neither offers salvation. The urgency of ‘stop fucking around!!!’ disrupts the poetic flow, acting as a slap to the reader’s expectations, reinforcing the idea that rebellion is not just aesthetic but necessary.
Broken Dreams is a collection that does not seek to comfort; it thrives on discomfort, on exposing the fractures in both the personal and collective psyche. WL Gertz crafts poetry that is at once deeply personal and unavoidably political, a relentless interrogation of time, ambition, and decay. His use of stark imagery, clipped syntax, and rapid tonal shifts mirrors the instability of the modern condition, making this a powerful addition to contemporary poetry.
For readers drawn to the existential grit of Charles Bukowski, the political sharpness of Allen Ginsberg, or the surreal fragmentation of Frank O’Hara, Broken Dreams will resonate deeply. This is poetry that demands attention—uneasy, unsparing, but always compelling.
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