Brendan Constantine, Letters to Guns

Start: 04/23/2010 7:00 pm

"In the hands of Brendan Constantine poetry is a weapon. That much is obvious. But one never knows, his poems will explode with bullets or flowers because Constantine is both guerilla fighter and beguiling jester. Melancholy, hysterical, literary, musical—the insights, like the forms (epistles, odes, annotated poems), of [i]Letters to Guns[i] are unpredictable,
innovative and above all gripping. I am as helpless as anyone looking down the barrel of a gun. These poems are dangerous fun!"

Terrance Hayes, author of Wind in a Box

"How can poems be so zany and gorgeous in the same breath, so brilliant and tender and shocking and hilarious? I
don’t know how Brendan Constantine does it, but I hope he keeps doing it—keeps bringing us these poems like
hymns from another universe, one both darker and more humane than our own, poems of astounding imagination
and sly profundity, rendered in language all Constantine’s own—language sharpened to a knife point, shined to a
blaze, rollicking and serious and utterly original."

Cecilia Woloch, author of LATE

Brendan Constantine's work has appeared in numerous journals, most notably Ploughshares, The Los Angeles Review, The Cortland Review, RUNES, and LA Times Bestseller The Underground Guide to Los Angeles. New work can be found in the Spring editions of Ninth Letter and The Boxcar Poetry Review, as well as the anthology Bright Wings. Mr. Constantine is currently poet in residence at the Windward School in West Los Angeles and the Idyllwild Arts Summer Youth Writing Program in Idyllwild, California. He holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Hollywood at Bela Lugosi’s last address.