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There Must Be a Reason People Come Here book cover
There Must Be a Reason People Come Here
2022
First Published
4.00
Average Rating
96
Number of Pages

A philosophical-minded and syntactically experimental book of poetry. The philosopher Catherine Malabou once “What should we do so that consciousness of the brain does not purely and simply coincide with the spirit of capitalism?” There Must Be A Reason People Come Here by Brian Foley is a collection of poems that attempts to answer this question by broadcasting the indirect effects of the lived condition of a subject squeezed under the structures of late capitalism. Lines like, “Hope is a chemical, not a dream ignited in the eye / that can be heard sober.” And “There is no sun here, / just habits of light” work through the contradictions of what it means to be negatively capable. It is a collection of poems that refuses to conform to the norms of what poetry is and how it must say things.

Avg Rating
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Author

Brian Foley
Brian Foley
Author · 4 books
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.
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