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.
“If Dead Man’s Float, as its title suggests, is doing the work of elegy, beneath the surface—water being an operative metaphor throughout—it is an unappeasable and unflinching quarrel with death itself. Tossed by loss and taunted by omens, Foley turns her scrappy, sinewy, verb-packed lines into lifelines, offering her readers a bounty of poems brought up from the depths of our mortal predicament.”
—Jeanne Marie Beaumont, author of Letters from Limbo, Burning of the Three Fires, and others
“Ruth Foley’s Dead Man’s Float exhibits a toughness and beauty that is remarkable for a first book. An elegiac urgency charges not only the intermittent sequence of poems that share the title ‘Dear Turquoise’ but the entire collection, which enacts the poet’s struggle to make sense of the senseless while refusing easy consolations, ‘the false safety of land.’ As with the surface of the earth, the ocean here is far more prevalent than the land—a constant shifting presence, now turbulent and dangerous, now emblematic of a desire to sink into nothingness. This book navigates that ocean; it’s nothing less than a book about emotional survival.
—Jeffrey Harrison, author of Into Daylight, The Names of Things, and others
“In Dead Man’s Float, Ruth Foley swims elegiacally. She swims as if she were a frog, ever hopeful for renewal (‘the frog rights itself’), facing ‘toward the west, or maybe toward / the sky.’ Simultaneously, she mourns, she loves, she pretends, she remembers, she tries to forget. She dips between feelings of guilt and optimism. She seeks activity, calm and comfort, while water in all its symbolism becomes the very air she breathes. Death swims beside her, even as she pretends not to remember the dead man’s float. There’s anger, yes, but just enough for this beautiful poetry to navigate all the waterways of human emotions.”
—Anne Harding Woodworth, author of The Eyes Have It, Unattached Male, and others