The Constitution

by Brian Foley

The 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.

Genres: Poetry

68 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2011

About the author

Brian Foley’s first collection of poems, The Constitution, is forthcoming from Black Ocean. He’s authored several chapbooks including Going Attractions (Greying Ghost, 2012) & TOTEM, out soon in jeans from Fact-Simile Editions. Recent poems have appeared in Boston, Review, The Paris American, IO: A Journal of New American Poetry, ILK, Sixth Finch, The Volta, Denver Quarterly, Aesthetix, The Destroyer, and elsewhere. With Julia Cohen he co-edits Saltgrass and w EB Goodale, he runs Brave Men Press. He lives well in Western Massachusetts.

Reviews

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Foley has a style that that unadorned and yet has a stripped-down beauty I often link to a poet like Robert Creeley. Foley's constitution is not so much political as about our primary values and life--love, family, morality--and how they can be made to reflect back unto themselves through Foley's "amendments." This creates a sparse poetics that is in constant dialogue with itself and is surprisingly human.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stripped down twisting of language. Loved how slowly it forced me to read.

[Greg Bem · Rating 5 out of 5]

I felt my insides question their underlying lifeline, that which exists and allows them to exist, that which is in the process of being sculpted, grafted, arranged.