Description
Book SynopsisThe debut full-length poetry collection from Brian Foley,
The Constitution boldly disrupts and troubles the beliefs we take for granted about ourselves and the rights we hold as true. While investigating ideas of home, love, morality, and loss, the poems also reflect back upon themselves, offering “amendments,” that question and rethink the poems that precede them. Taken together, the poems of
The Constitution reveal the instability and flux of the principles we use as the foundation of our selves.
Trade Review“Brian Foley is the poet laureate of
No Man’s Land and
The Constitution is his bloodletting. Each poem casts a spare spell, spilling difficult medicine when it breaks “scrib- / bled” down the middle. He’s always breaking things, breaking them open, finding clarity in middle’s muddle, revealing how each word is necessary to “see it nerve.” He writes: “leave your / belongings / in your mouth / mine” and with each deep, stark cut the empty mouth becomes a house, built and filled. It is constituted. And hard work has its rewards. After all, “the middle // of nowhere / has plenty / of lovers.” —Chris Martin, author of Becoming Weather and American Music
“A book of limits, a book of pain, the taut lines & precise ear in Brian Foley’s
The Constitution speak clearly but open expansively. The poems are as accessible as a face & as deep as a chord. It is a relief to read
The Constitution, to know that however much desire & pain & love & joy & the unspeakable may damage that Foley understands & can mend me.” —Mathias Svalina, co-publisher of Octopus Books
“Thank you stars, thank you poetry, Brian Foley has written us a truly empathetic, wonderful, complicated good book--welcome to
The Constitution, where we are invited to navigate the poet’s interior country--by turns devastated, aching, yet gathering light. I will still “dare to be good” with this book’s help, courting disaster, open to amending the laws of a heart’s complicated truth.
The Constitution is my blueprint for a kinder, more feeling world. These poems guide me through the wilderness inside.” —Wendy Xu, author of You Are Not Dead
