The Constitution
(Black Ocean, 2014)
14.95by Brian Foley
Paperback / 80p. / Poetry
ISBN 978-1-939568-04-5
VISIT BLACK OCEAN TO PURCHASE A COPY
(Black Ocean, 2014)
14.95by Brian Foley
Paperback / 80p. / Poetry
ISBN 978-1-939568-04-5
VISIT BLACK OCEAN TO PURCHASE A COPY
Praise:
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 knows the only way to fight the nothing is to double it, amending absence to disclose the abundance that was (is) always there. 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 & American Music
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
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 knows the only way to fight the nothing is to double it, amending absence to disclose the abundance that was (is) always there. 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 & American Music
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
Reviews:
(Review by Danniel Schoonebeek - original appearance in Publishers Weekly)
Foley's road-weary debut derives beauty from exhaustion and manages to counter, through the poems' sparseness and crispness, the kind of poetry whose raison d'être is the exhaustion of beauty. "Just look in two eyes that years took out," he writes, hazarding the question of what constitutes the body and the body politic alike, and arriving at his answer with full-circle fatalism: "As soon as we finish/ we want to be// understood again." Foley's lines feel both distilled of impurities and at risk for demolition, as though he's "asked a blank/ piece of paper// to wishbone." His minimalism is fascinating in its ability to tonally blur the lines between a redacted version of America's most sacred text and the earnest last breath of a man with a lot of miles on him. The book begins in media res, after battle has been declared and destruction looms large, and Foley wastes no time in making his most heartbreaking claim: "Already we need/ hay to fill/ our effigies." These lines may locate Foley in the heritage of Homer and literature's most sacred war text, but in his contemporary world, fueled as it is by uncertainty about our future, "one wants to hire/ the horrors of today// ...more than/ one angry Achilles." (Mar.)
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
(Review by Joanna Novak - original appearance in Diagram)
Article 1: Paying Dues to the Fatherland and Mothership: a Rough Erasure from the O.E.D.'s Constitution Entry
See the verb, which is constitutionalize or, more familiarly, constitute. See Hobbes' Leviathan: "Before constitution of Soveraign Power...all men had right to all things."
See the act of decreeing, decrying, ordaining, organizing; enacted by a raw emperor.
Article 2: A summing
Carrie Olivia Adams, Black Ocean's poetry editor, interviewed by Dana Jennings in The New York Times: "In these attention-starved times, when we are communicating significant global events in under 140 characters, what better medium could there be than one that believes in concision, compression and the power of the small to convey the great? Poetry may be the world's best sound bites—certainly some of the most human and necessary."
+
United States Constitution: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Foley's sound bites put voice to the struggle for basic human needs, which may be broadly umbrella'd beneath domestic Tranquility. The poems in The Constitution fight for food, shelter, the beatitude of moral or ethical higher powers.
Article 3: Anatomy
Prefaced by the downright Preambley, "Self Assessment," The Constitution is divided into four sections, each longer than the last, each lamplit with more "Amendments," totemic poems that loosely recapitulate the thematic material they follow.
The book is small and handsome, orange and black and snow-touched-by-tire-white, with a cover that, to this reviewer, bears a resemblance to a barcode or a neurotic's stack of kindling.
Article 4: Names
The Constitution rides the momentum of its title, so rife with connotations and denotations, national and personal, concrete and ephemeral. What constitutes a government, a body, a governing body, a governed body, or, as Foley writes in "Self Assessment," "the body/which moves/in habit" (7-9)? What constitutes a home, the speaker's poems seem to ask? Or, in other words, can the heart and its lofty ideals be constituted soley by the body—vile, viced, base?
Article 5: Body Composition
"I was once/an accident/a car come off/the road," Foley writes in "Beauty Holds Onto a Finger," a poem in the collection's second section that finds the speaker reminiscing on a stint in a hospital. An accident, an incident, an amendment, an advent, an inception, a birth: if these poems are bodies, they are stiltish legs, stork and tottering, slim poem with uneven stanzas. A quatrain followed by a tercet interrupted by a couplet; a collection of tercets capped off with a couplet: formless forms that allow the primal diction to shape these lyrics. They take their form from their content—or that which constitutes them.
Article 6: Disembodiment
When I finished reading The Constitution, I felt as though I had been wandering around a leafless woods, where lean-tos and thatched huts appeared, Blair Witch-y. Upon rereading, the poems' spareness revealed itself to be a facet—perhaps, a strength—of the speaker's tone, which is reserved and rationally irrational, as in "Object Lesson":
"too bad/my story will arrive/on the scene/with my corpse//all my strength/popped out"
Still, examining the poems' concrete guts reveals the tension between what is consumed—liquor, onion, chicken heart—and what consumes—poison, sky, rot, home.
Hay, chimney, house, tree, gargoyles, buildings, deer tick, sky, sun, horses, grass, grenade helmet, battlefields, cemetery, angel, boats, throats, cicada, cathedral, moon, fog, dollar, cloud, truck, sea shells, knife, car, liquor, orphan, money, light, food, body, wedge, door, hands, sun, calluses, eye, black lines, poison, teeth, pet, seaweed, bone, sea, waves, cricket, forest, stars, soap bubble, winter fur, bones, snow, splinter, lip, belly, tool, wood, sink, hood, father, sea, clothes, bread, mouse, heart of a palm, crumbs, cellar, rook, box, string, onion, buildings, street, woods, photo albums, hinges, doors, wall, trees, fingeroil, scales, fish, ant, vein, parachute, scissors, flag, bull, dahlia, rot, rubble, leaves, lightbulbs, nail, toothpick, stocks, stump, woods, parasites, ear, chicken heart, home...
The book, then, is a landscape like the body might wander through, a world barren with objects.
Article 7: Tithes
What a reader might owe Foley after reading The Constitution is revolt; a dismantling of civic observance, or at least a revision of that which we let ourselves be lorded by. Let them be houses or fathers, women or mothers or laws, liquor or hunger or touch—what leaves us "pinched in exposed space," as Foley writes in "Rising," slaves to shelters that keep us from running wild.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
(Review by Greg Bern - original appearance in Poetry Northwest)
The Constitution is a book of lessons, a book of learning how to become one with what is known and unknown. The first epiphany: that we each have our own body. We are individual. The second: that we must understand it. To Foley, our body is a universal placard of self-definition. What is health? What is our constitution? By coming to know our limits and our place in the world, we know our humanity, our personal composition. “As soon as we finish / we want to be // understood again” says the first Amendment, and so continues an enduring loop of self-examination. The body of the self, in the case of Foley’s book, is represented by the book and its speaker’s curiosities: namely, how is it to exist and to be okay with our own health and stability?
In “Object Lesson,” “more than / one angry Achilles / is made into // ideal values / drenched in heroics / finding nothing / but the hope worn.” Foley explores existence through shadows of experience. Here the source is a myth, but one broken (through the line) into mindful fragmentation. The breakage is subtle, yet amplifies rhythm, like lungs breathing, like the skeleton’s individual bones creaking, and it shows us a world of slow, often depressed movement. Like a ghost, The Constitution’s speaker takes us on a path of strange cause and effect.
Filled with crisis and vision, The Constitution’s speaker moves from impression to impression, trafficking in dark, even nihilistic, semantics. One poem is titled “You Are On Fired.” Many more upend expected syntax: “so teeth we can’t touch / without dismantle” and “to tongue the empty longitude.” Each of these is engaged in the process of knowing more of what we are. What I thought was a ghastly hopelessness during my first read of The Constitution became a transformative, inspiring process, an amendment of earlier conclusions. Within the book itself, each “Amendment” (there are fifteen total) reflects new assertions about language in a world that is frequently unknowable and dark. One reads:
What you can
do without
can’t grow.
Won’t wither.
Won’t crow.
Won’t feed on
the dead.
But live
like live.
(from “Amendment,” p. 35-36)
This poem could easily be a statement on the valueless eternity of our ephemera. But the world is vast and our impact on it may in part be very minimal. So we must allow “live / like live” as mantra to keep ourselves afloat. We must allow that which is to continue to be. Foley’s world is a world of speakers who own their “self” and their “identity” but only through a thorough disavowal. But that act of disavowal is the result of awareness. It is a process as spiritual as it is material. Through the Amendment process, we are being invited to improve upon prior fatalism. We are asked to make a judgment on our own perception, on our being. Though the damnation of the world may result in a darkness that depresses us, we must first come to know that darkness.
The tension between what draws us in and pushes us away animates the agonizing beauty of The Constitution. Foley’s book is more than an echo chamber or a textbook where you are invited to learn through the actions of his speaker. It is a blueprint for your own journey. Foley offers smokey, cryptic lines that invite the challenge. There is a distance that comes through individual quirk and mystery. In “Free Radicals,” the tone is almost goblin:
the eye that puckers
at mine
the eye half
my own fault
(from “Free Radicals,” p. 40)
We would never speak these lines. They are the lines of the synapse, the charges of the brain as we fall receptive to action. Foley’s speaker is a Cursed Poet, a poet whose writing shimmers with the hope of the known as long as you look, and as soon as you stop, shift the pressure, his work explodes in a new direction. Repetition of this perception is the basis for Foley’s reality, or what he claims as reality: it is a space of tweaks, morphs, and rifts. In “Picador,” “shadow invents / a sense of say nothing,” calling upon the need to be mindful in nature—though static in its presence—in order to maintain stability amidst darkness. But at the same time, his speaker is filled with the tragic inclination to never sit still. I empathized. Entropy is a golden constant. We are constantly giving ourselves up. We are “Shaped / by unattempt.” Foley’s poems teaches us how we give ourselves up—and why. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
(Review by Sally McCallum - original appearance at The Volta blog)
This book begins with a self assessment. “Already we need / hay to fill / our effigies.” Already: even at its incipient moment, what constitutes of self-thing is called in to question. And even as the self grows, it recalls the ruins of what came before:
Put something
in it & leave
it to leaven.
It will rise like
the chimney
that stands
after the house.
When I was asked to review this book, I had some doubts. It is entitled The Constitution, so I thought, oh, the USA. And I have recently developed an allergic reaction to writing that takes up the task of examining national identity, really any national identity, but writing that deals with American national identity in particular – I’ve lately just been really cranky about it (I was living abroad). It seems to me such dialogs must necessarily write too many people out. For nearly any sort of person, of any sort of history, has had grounds to be defined as fundamentally American, at some point. And then saying, that very fact is what is defines America, seems too facile to me. Can’t we stop asking what is really American, I have been saying to myself.
As it turns out, this book was more or less what I needed to read. Because it’s not specifically about a nation, this nation – if you want it to be, sure, it could be, but well, only sort of – and because the task of examining any sort of identity is bound to leave us a bit desperate, a bit winded, but also exhilarated, maybe and if not hopeful than energetic.
One of the book’s epigraphs, from Ezra Pound, reads : To say many things is equal to having a home.
And this book does say many things. Broken down in to four sections, and punctuated by amendments, The Constitution is a book best read aloud to oneself precisely because it is difficult to read aloud, because the “scrib/bled” verse defies your assumptions about standard syntax and common locutions, such that as you try to pronounce these poems you’ll constantly have to amend your speech. These poems and their titles shelter jokes, bets and challenges; you’ll learn to expect to be surprised by endings to poems like “Moon Above the Law”:
like the moon
things happen
only once in
Don’t take anything for granted, not your right to a complete and conventional utterance, nor the fact that you may mold who you are, not the choice to consume what you choose, be it food or text:
every body
talks about the weather but you
know we can’t choose our food
but we can eat
an excerpt
bigger than
a
What is the sublimely rare and enormous antecedent that escapes these poems? I do not know, and neither, I think, does the book:
It is difficult
to value what cannot
be named
Which sets me thinking about, sorry, America again, since value is supposedly a national keyword (though, seriously, try not to think too much about America as you read. Or ever. Think precisely about what is in front of you). What is it with us and the incessant desire to define ourselves, as a people? Do all nations do that? Do even that many Americans do that, or is the interest of only a certain sort? How can I know? And how can I know whether any American identity, which you know I’m contending doesn’t exist, how can I know whether that non-existent American identity has any bearing on me, on my self, on my constitution? And why do I need to know? The Constitution tells me that “a need / is no evidence / of absence” – so perhaps then, I do know – perhaps the knowing of the self and the not-knowing are here, bound.
Have fun if you fumble over these brief lyrics. Our speaker’s voice is at times critical, at times funny and always arresting in its minimalist grace. Ask yourself as you read whether you are where you think you are. The book itself does ask this, and periodically presents “Amendments” that retrace the steps that brought us here from that strange lone chimney where we began; that question what how we continue to draw breath here:
I am under an impression
I stay alive inside
attachments instant
as the air is previously owned
The presence of these amendments bids us to “stomach / the mistake of creation // provoked by the presence / of revision”.
And so as I say, perhaps this was the book I needed, for if I’m sick of hearing & attempting to generate and revise definitions of my own identity, then what I needed or what I wanted was to be reminded that the incessant return to the question, the incessant interrogation of identity and revision of the plan, was always already part of the self itself. I suppose. And you know? That was a poor sentence, but I am not going to rewrite it.
Already I’m filling my effigy with hay. All this speaking and writing and stuffing of tissue into shape has led us somewhere, maybe home. Here is a voice that animates uncertainty: that founds a script that writes on no thing and nothing out. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
( Review by Rob Mclennan - original appearance at Rob Mclennan’s Blog)
The poems that make up Massachusetts poet and publisher Brian Foley’s debut trade poetry collection, The Constitution (Black Ocean, 2013), move in a series of rhythmic hesitations and pauses through explorations of awareness. In the title poem, he writes: “With you scrib- / bled beside me / I don’t know / who I’m not. / Awareness is / just punishment.” He writes in a cadence with echoes of San Diego poet Rae Armantrout’s work, but with the combined explorations of both internal and external landscapes, and how the two are intricately linked. His poems seem to skim and bounce like stones across the water, hiding far deeper, more subtle depths through a remarkably deceptive simplicity. As the back cover suggests, Foley does work to question what we might take for granted, as even his lines unsettle, shifting an appearance of sentences that break down into phrases that collide and accumulate, forcing connections that might otherwise remained impossible in such a short space. As he writes in the poem “HERE DOES NOTHING”: “It would not take gun- // point to fit me into / a simple question, // a chance more de- / finite than ever I was // worth, not knowing / gone came earlier.” Through his series of small collisions, there is a wonderfully vibrant sense of wordplay and pun that underscore each poem, one that exists as a series of wry gestures, from the poem title “You Are On Fired,” to the opening of the poem “THE BIRTHDAYS,” that reads: “children per- / forming parents / photo albums // reach / their image / & cease / existing[.]” Composed in a series of lyric meditations, The Constitution is remarkably cohesive for a first collection of short lyrics, and one can enter anywhere in the book and get at least an idea of the larger portrait, without giving too much away. Throughout, The Constitution works to deliberately evolve, and even unsettle, questioning and updating, from the early inclusion of the title poem, followed throughout the collection by a series of “Amendments,”
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
(Review by Mike Young - original appearance at Electric Literature)
Probably this book will have so few words you can read it in an hour. In a gnashy shiver hour. In an hour sculpted like a tiny hacksaw made of ice and melting in the gap where you got your wisdom tooth out. In an hour slow as crag erosion on a foggy Atlantic cape. An hour as small as the twin spears of light out in front of your busted-ass car guiding you home in the murk. Read it in hour, read it like an oar, roll it into an our.
(Review by Danniel Schoonebeek - original appearance in Publishers Weekly)
Foley's road-weary debut derives beauty from exhaustion and manages to counter, through the poems' sparseness and crispness, the kind of poetry whose raison d'être is the exhaustion of beauty. "Just look in two eyes that years took out," he writes, hazarding the question of what constitutes the body and the body politic alike, and arriving at his answer with full-circle fatalism: "As soon as we finish/ we want to be// understood again." Foley's lines feel both distilled of impurities and at risk for demolition, as though he's "asked a blank/ piece of paper// to wishbone." His minimalism is fascinating in its ability to tonally blur the lines between a redacted version of America's most sacred text and the earnest last breath of a man with a lot of miles on him. The book begins in media res, after battle has been declared and destruction looms large, and Foley wastes no time in making his most heartbreaking claim: "Already we need/ hay to fill/ our effigies." These lines may locate Foley in the heritage of Homer and literature's most sacred war text, but in his contemporary world, fueled as it is by uncertainty about our future, "one wants to hire/ the horrors of today// ...more than/ one angry Achilles." (Mar.)
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
(Review by Joanna Novak - original appearance in Diagram)
Article 1: Paying Dues to the Fatherland and Mothership: a Rough Erasure from the O.E.D.'s Constitution Entry
See the verb, which is constitutionalize or, more familiarly, constitute. See Hobbes' Leviathan: "Before constitution of Soveraign Power...all men had right to all things."
See the act of decreeing, decrying, ordaining, organizing; enacted by a raw emperor.
Article 2: A summing
Carrie Olivia Adams, Black Ocean's poetry editor, interviewed by Dana Jennings in The New York Times: "In these attention-starved times, when we are communicating significant global events in under 140 characters, what better medium could there be than one that believes in concision, compression and the power of the small to convey the great? Poetry may be the world's best sound bites—certainly some of the most human and necessary."
+
United States Constitution: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Foley's sound bites put voice to the struggle for basic human needs, which may be broadly umbrella'd beneath domestic Tranquility. The poems in The Constitution fight for food, shelter, the beatitude of moral or ethical higher powers.
Article 3: Anatomy
Prefaced by the downright Preambley, "Self Assessment," The Constitution is divided into four sections, each longer than the last, each lamplit with more "Amendments," totemic poems that loosely recapitulate the thematic material they follow.
The book is small and handsome, orange and black and snow-touched-by-tire-white, with a cover that, to this reviewer, bears a resemblance to a barcode or a neurotic's stack of kindling.
Article 4: Names
The Constitution rides the momentum of its title, so rife with connotations and denotations, national and personal, concrete and ephemeral. What constitutes a government, a body, a governing body, a governed body, or, as Foley writes in "Self Assessment," "the body/which moves/in habit" (7-9)? What constitutes a home, the speaker's poems seem to ask? Or, in other words, can the heart and its lofty ideals be constituted soley by the body—vile, viced, base?
Article 5: Body Composition
"I was once/an accident/a car come off/the road," Foley writes in "Beauty Holds Onto a Finger," a poem in the collection's second section that finds the speaker reminiscing on a stint in a hospital. An accident, an incident, an amendment, an advent, an inception, a birth: if these poems are bodies, they are stiltish legs, stork and tottering, slim poem with uneven stanzas. A quatrain followed by a tercet interrupted by a couplet; a collection of tercets capped off with a couplet: formless forms that allow the primal diction to shape these lyrics. They take their form from their content—or that which constitutes them.
Article 6: Disembodiment
When I finished reading The Constitution, I felt as though I had been wandering around a leafless woods, where lean-tos and thatched huts appeared, Blair Witch-y. Upon rereading, the poems' spareness revealed itself to be a facet—perhaps, a strength—of the speaker's tone, which is reserved and rationally irrational, as in "Object Lesson":
"too bad/my story will arrive/on the scene/with my corpse//all my strength/popped out"
Still, examining the poems' concrete guts reveals the tension between what is consumed—liquor, onion, chicken heart—and what consumes—poison, sky, rot, home.
Hay, chimney, house, tree, gargoyles, buildings, deer tick, sky, sun, horses, grass, grenade helmet, battlefields, cemetery, angel, boats, throats, cicada, cathedral, moon, fog, dollar, cloud, truck, sea shells, knife, car, liquor, orphan, money, light, food, body, wedge, door, hands, sun, calluses, eye, black lines, poison, teeth, pet, seaweed, bone, sea, waves, cricket, forest, stars, soap bubble, winter fur, bones, snow, splinter, lip, belly, tool, wood, sink, hood, father, sea, clothes, bread, mouse, heart of a palm, crumbs, cellar, rook, box, string, onion, buildings, street, woods, photo albums, hinges, doors, wall, trees, fingeroil, scales, fish, ant, vein, parachute, scissors, flag, bull, dahlia, rot, rubble, leaves, lightbulbs, nail, toothpick, stocks, stump, woods, parasites, ear, chicken heart, home...
The book, then, is a landscape like the body might wander through, a world barren with objects.
Article 7: Tithes
What a reader might owe Foley after reading The Constitution is revolt; a dismantling of civic observance, or at least a revision of that which we let ourselves be lorded by. Let them be houses or fathers, women or mothers or laws, liquor or hunger or touch—what leaves us "pinched in exposed space," as Foley writes in "Rising," slaves to shelters that keep us from running wild.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
(Review by Greg Bern - original appearance in Poetry Northwest)
The Constitution is a book of lessons, a book of learning how to become one with what is known and unknown. The first epiphany: that we each have our own body. We are individual. The second: that we must understand it. To Foley, our body is a universal placard of self-definition. What is health? What is our constitution? By coming to know our limits and our place in the world, we know our humanity, our personal composition. “As soon as we finish / we want to be // understood again” says the first Amendment, and so continues an enduring loop of self-examination. The body of the self, in the case of Foley’s book, is represented by the book and its speaker’s curiosities: namely, how is it to exist and to be okay with our own health and stability?
In “Object Lesson,” “more than / one angry Achilles / is made into // ideal values / drenched in heroics / finding nothing / but the hope worn.” Foley explores existence through shadows of experience. Here the source is a myth, but one broken (through the line) into mindful fragmentation. The breakage is subtle, yet amplifies rhythm, like lungs breathing, like the skeleton’s individual bones creaking, and it shows us a world of slow, often depressed movement. Like a ghost, The Constitution’s speaker takes us on a path of strange cause and effect.
Filled with crisis and vision, The Constitution’s speaker moves from impression to impression, trafficking in dark, even nihilistic, semantics. One poem is titled “You Are On Fired.” Many more upend expected syntax: “so teeth we can’t touch / without dismantle” and “to tongue the empty longitude.” Each of these is engaged in the process of knowing more of what we are. What I thought was a ghastly hopelessness during my first read of The Constitution became a transformative, inspiring process, an amendment of earlier conclusions. Within the book itself, each “Amendment” (there are fifteen total) reflects new assertions about language in a world that is frequently unknowable and dark. One reads:
What you can
do without
can’t grow.
Won’t wither.
Won’t crow.
Won’t feed on
the dead.
But live
like live.
(from “Amendment,” p. 35-36)
This poem could easily be a statement on the valueless eternity of our ephemera. But the world is vast and our impact on it may in part be very minimal. So we must allow “live / like live” as mantra to keep ourselves afloat. We must allow that which is to continue to be. Foley’s world is a world of speakers who own their “self” and their “identity” but only through a thorough disavowal. But that act of disavowal is the result of awareness. It is a process as spiritual as it is material. Through the Amendment process, we are being invited to improve upon prior fatalism. We are asked to make a judgment on our own perception, on our being. Though the damnation of the world may result in a darkness that depresses us, we must first come to know that darkness.
The tension between what draws us in and pushes us away animates the agonizing beauty of The Constitution. Foley’s book is more than an echo chamber or a textbook where you are invited to learn through the actions of his speaker. It is a blueprint for your own journey. Foley offers smokey, cryptic lines that invite the challenge. There is a distance that comes through individual quirk and mystery. In “Free Radicals,” the tone is almost goblin:
the eye that puckers
at mine
the eye half
my own fault
(from “Free Radicals,” p. 40)
We would never speak these lines. They are the lines of the synapse, the charges of the brain as we fall receptive to action. Foley’s speaker is a Cursed Poet, a poet whose writing shimmers with the hope of the known as long as you look, and as soon as you stop, shift the pressure, his work explodes in a new direction. Repetition of this perception is the basis for Foley’s reality, or what he claims as reality: it is a space of tweaks, morphs, and rifts. In “Picador,” “shadow invents / a sense of say nothing,” calling upon the need to be mindful in nature—though static in its presence—in order to maintain stability amidst darkness. But at the same time, his speaker is filled with the tragic inclination to never sit still. I empathized. Entropy is a golden constant. We are constantly giving ourselves up. We are “Shaped / by unattempt.” Foley’s poems teaches us how we give ourselves up—and why. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
(Review by Sally McCallum - original appearance at The Volta blog)
This book begins with a self assessment. “Already we need / hay to fill / our effigies.” Already: even at its incipient moment, what constitutes of self-thing is called in to question. And even as the self grows, it recalls the ruins of what came before:
Put something
in it & leave
it to leaven.
It will rise like
the chimney
that stands
after the house.
When I was asked to review this book, I had some doubts. It is entitled The Constitution, so I thought, oh, the USA. And I have recently developed an allergic reaction to writing that takes up the task of examining national identity, really any national identity, but writing that deals with American national identity in particular – I’ve lately just been really cranky about it (I was living abroad). It seems to me such dialogs must necessarily write too many people out. For nearly any sort of person, of any sort of history, has had grounds to be defined as fundamentally American, at some point. And then saying, that very fact is what is defines America, seems too facile to me. Can’t we stop asking what is really American, I have been saying to myself.
As it turns out, this book was more or less what I needed to read. Because it’s not specifically about a nation, this nation – if you want it to be, sure, it could be, but well, only sort of – and because the task of examining any sort of identity is bound to leave us a bit desperate, a bit winded, but also exhilarated, maybe and if not hopeful than energetic.
One of the book’s epigraphs, from Ezra Pound, reads : To say many things is equal to having a home.
And this book does say many things. Broken down in to four sections, and punctuated by amendments, The Constitution is a book best read aloud to oneself precisely because it is difficult to read aloud, because the “scrib/bled” verse defies your assumptions about standard syntax and common locutions, such that as you try to pronounce these poems you’ll constantly have to amend your speech. These poems and their titles shelter jokes, bets and challenges; you’ll learn to expect to be surprised by endings to poems like “Moon Above the Law”:
like the moon
things happen
only once in
Don’t take anything for granted, not your right to a complete and conventional utterance, nor the fact that you may mold who you are, not the choice to consume what you choose, be it food or text:
every body
talks about the weather but you
know we can’t choose our food
but we can eat
an excerpt
bigger than
a
What is the sublimely rare and enormous antecedent that escapes these poems? I do not know, and neither, I think, does the book:
It is difficult
to value what cannot
be named
Which sets me thinking about, sorry, America again, since value is supposedly a national keyword (though, seriously, try not to think too much about America as you read. Or ever. Think precisely about what is in front of you). What is it with us and the incessant desire to define ourselves, as a people? Do all nations do that? Do even that many Americans do that, or is the interest of only a certain sort? How can I know? And how can I know whether any American identity, which you know I’m contending doesn’t exist, how can I know whether that non-existent American identity has any bearing on me, on my self, on my constitution? And why do I need to know? The Constitution tells me that “a need / is no evidence / of absence” – so perhaps then, I do know – perhaps the knowing of the self and the not-knowing are here, bound.
Have fun if you fumble over these brief lyrics. Our speaker’s voice is at times critical, at times funny and always arresting in its minimalist grace. Ask yourself as you read whether you are where you think you are. The book itself does ask this, and periodically presents “Amendments” that retrace the steps that brought us here from that strange lone chimney where we began; that question what how we continue to draw breath here:
I am under an impression
I stay alive inside
attachments instant
as the air is previously owned
The presence of these amendments bids us to “stomach / the mistake of creation // provoked by the presence / of revision”.
And so as I say, perhaps this was the book I needed, for if I’m sick of hearing & attempting to generate and revise definitions of my own identity, then what I needed or what I wanted was to be reminded that the incessant return to the question, the incessant interrogation of identity and revision of the plan, was always already part of the self itself. I suppose. And you know? That was a poor sentence, but I am not going to rewrite it.
Already I’m filling my effigy with hay. All this speaking and writing and stuffing of tissue into shape has led us somewhere, maybe home. Here is a voice that animates uncertainty: that founds a script that writes on no thing and nothing out. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
( Review by Rob Mclennan - original appearance at Rob Mclennan’s Blog)
The poems that make up Massachusetts poet and publisher Brian Foley’s debut trade poetry collection, The Constitution (Black Ocean, 2013), move in a series of rhythmic hesitations and pauses through explorations of awareness. In the title poem, he writes: “With you scrib- / bled beside me / I don’t know / who I’m not. / Awareness is / just punishment.” He writes in a cadence with echoes of San Diego poet Rae Armantrout’s work, but with the combined explorations of both internal and external landscapes, and how the two are intricately linked. His poems seem to skim and bounce like stones across the water, hiding far deeper, more subtle depths through a remarkably deceptive simplicity. As the back cover suggests, Foley does work to question what we might take for granted, as even his lines unsettle, shifting an appearance of sentences that break down into phrases that collide and accumulate, forcing connections that might otherwise remained impossible in such a short space. As he writes in the poem “HERE DOES NOTHING”: “It would not take gun- // point to fit me into / a simple question, // a chance more de- / finite than ever I was // worth, not knowing / gone came earlier.” Through his series of small collisions, there is a wonderfully vibrant sense of wordplay and pun that underscore each poem, one that exists as a series of wry gestures, from the poem title “You Are On Fired,” to the opening of the poem “THE BIRTHDAYS,” that reads: “children per- / forming parents / photo albums // reach / their image / & cease / existing[.]” Composed in a series of lyric meditations, The Constitution is remarkably cohesive for a first collection of short lyrics, and one can enter anywhere in the book and get at least an idea of the larger portrait, without giving too much away. Throughout, The Constitution works to deliberately evolve, and even unsettle, questioning and updating, from the early inclusion of the title poem, followed throughout the collection by a series of “Amendments,”
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(Review by Mike Young - original appearance at Electric Literature)
Probably this book will have so few words you can read it in an hour. In a gnashy shiver hour. In an hour sculpted like a tiny hacksaw made of ice and melting in the gap where you got your wisdom tooth out. In an hour slow as crag erosion on a foggy Atlantic cape. An hour as small as the twin spears of light out in front of your busted-ass car guiding you home in the murk. Read it in hour, read it like an oar, roll it into an our.