Dead Man's Float

Ruth Foley's Dead Man's Float is an ode to the sea, the earth, and the body. This is a collection of estuary poems: wooded and mossed over, burying all the things we'd like to forget in the deepest of forests, the wettest of mud, the farthest depths of the ocean. There is an ever-present sense of loss-- sadness that looms and storms, hovering in the corner of each page, just beyond the horizon line. And yet, these poems expose a way to salvage beauty and hope in times of grief and heartbreak, in loss beyond simply death. It is not only through oceanic allegory that Foley explores longing; here is the sense that finding land--the respite of stillness--is the goal. There is no creature left unearthed to roam without meaning; even the millipede brings the hope of understanding to the violent forces of nature, to the nuances of human experience. In this balance between love and loss, ocean and earth, life and death, loneliness and solitude, Foley's mesmerizing dance mimics the tide.