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The Opposites Game: Poems
96 pages, Paperback
Published March 3, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 13, 2026
This book of poems is secretly a book of magic tricks. You read Brendan Constantine's fifth collection the way you'd play the game it's named for - a little off-balance, half-laughing, never quite sure what the next line will turn into. You start a poem thinking you know where it's headed and end up somewhere achingly tender, blinking like you've walked out of a dark theater into afternoon light.
What stays with you is the swing of it. One moment Constantine has you grinning, and the next he's wondering whether to buy a bulletproof shawl for his aging mother, and the grin goes still on your face. He keeps doing this. He earns your laughter and then spends it on something that aches.
He has a way of making you fall for small, broken things. After his poems you find yourself looking differently at a cracked bowl, at a fish circling its tank, at how dark it gets so early now. Ordinary stuff you'd walked past your whole life suddenly has weight. That's the best magic trick of the book - it makes it so that you never look at the world the same again.
Also - it's fun, which is rarer in poetry than it should be. You want to read these aloud to someone in the room. You want to dog-ear pages and text people lines. But days later it's not the jokes you're carrying around, it's the soft places underneath them.
You finish The Opposites Game a little more awake to your own life. Then you flip back to the start and play again.
What stays with you is the swing of it. One moment Constantine has you grinning, and the next he's wondering whether to buy a bulletproof shawl for his aging mother, and the grin goes still on your face. He keeps doing this. He earns your laughter and then spends it on something that aches.
He has a way of making you fall for small, broken things. After his poems you find yourself looking differently at a cracked bowl, at a fish circling its tank, at how dark it gets so early now. Ordinary stuff you'd walked past your whole life suddenly has weight. That's the best magic trick of the book - it makes it so that you never look at the world the same again.
Also - it's fun, which is rarer in poetry than it should be. You want to read these aloud to someone in the room. You want to dog-ear pages and text people lines. But days later it's not the jokes you're carrying around, it's the soft places underneath them.
You finish The Opposites Game a little more awake to your own life. Then you flip back to the start and play again.
March 14, 2026
The kind of poems I want to write!
May 5, 2026
I learned a lot about poetry reading this; will definitely re-read!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews