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ABOUT THE BOOK: A timely book about forgetting, Dementia, My Darling constructs a thesis on life as we remember it from moment to moment. What is your first memory of love? How soon will you forget answering that question? There is no history but biography, and the heart is a biased historian. ADVANCE PRAISE: "Brendan Constantine's Dementia, My Darling is a mediation on memory. Poems address the difficulty of the death of memory and how does a survivor deal with recollections of a father's lie, a collective lie about snow, school desk carvings, sleep talking, moths, and hospital ceilings. This collection examines consciousness, connotations, and relationships. Constantine is a master poet illuminating the ordinary and extraordinary with his distinct voice holding humor and heart equally." ‐Steven Reigns, author of Inheritance "Dementia, My Darling is a suite of acute, beautiful poems about coming apart, slippage, love, emptying out, transformation, and carrying on. Every absurdly human moment in them is handled with smarts and just the right mix of inventiveness and delicacy. Each poem leaves its mark on the reader. Tender and humane and unsparing, the poems never surrender to despair. They all have a kind of brightness. Constantine renders the creeping surrealism of dementia from many angles, with the awe that is its due. Gaps, anagrams, collage and montage are employed to convey the myriad ways we fragment, multiply, dissolve. A fly is described as 'an ink blot with wings / a blood spot / that sings a thin hymn.' (!!) This book is a lyrical wrestling match with mortality." ‐Amy Gerstler, author of Dearest Creature "I love this collection. I'm dazzled by its spectacular acts of imagination, the places it invents, the ways it invents of describing those places. Its most wondrous feat, though, is the heart it allows to beat behind its intelligence, the person that peers from its intricate, sharp, brilliant latticework: so much structure, so much sharpness, and that softness, too. Bravo." ‐Mandy Kahn, author of Math, Heaven, Time ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Brendan Constantine is a poet based in Hollywood. His work has appeared in numerous journals, most notably Ploughshares, FIELD, Zyzzyva, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, ArtLife, PANK and L.A. Times Best Seller, The Underground Guide to Los Angeles. His first book, Letters To Guns (Red Hen Press 2009), is now required reading in creative writing programs across the nation. His most recent collections are Birthday Girl With Possum (Write Bloody Publishing 2011) and Calamity Joe (Red Hen Press 2012). Mr. Constantine has had work commissioned by the Getty Museum and he has received grants from the James Irvine Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. He is currently poet in residence at the Windward School and adjunct professor at Antioch University. In addition, he regularly offers classes in hospitals, prisons, shelters, and with the Alzheimer's Poetry Project. FROM THE BOOK: The Bear Chapter by Brendan Constantine No one watches the stewardess anymore; how she demonstrates the belt, the mask, the life vest. We've got it down. Maybe not our lives, our money & regret, or how to breathe while kissing, but, by God, we know how to survive a water landing. The stewardess doesnt look at us either, but at someplace that's really behind her, the way dancers do. It's a recital, after all. In the wild we're told not to sleep too near our food, to put even our champagne far away. There's a checklist of other things, written by a man so bored, he's forgotten what survival is. Bears attack, he says, if we surprise them. But he won't say how; whether bears are easily frightened or just don't like parties. When shipping a bear by air, its ticket must be taped to the cage in a waterproof bag. Someone has to check this, someone who long ago stopped imagining a sea full of floating luggage, full of drowned bears in boxes. The stewardess swims by. We call to her, she to us; the ocean swallows our cries. No surprises here. From the book Dementia, My Darling by Brendan Constantine This poem originally appeared in the journal Zyzzyva.
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