Sundress Announces the Release of Ruth Foley’s Dead Man’s Float

Sundress Publications announces the release of Ruth Foley’s Collection, Dead Man’s Float. 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.

After reading this collection, Jeanne Marie Beaumont, author of Letters from Limbo and Burning of the Three Fires states that Foley 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.”

Order Dead Man’s Float on the Sundress website.

Ruth Foley lives in Massachusetts, where she teaches English for Wheaton College. Her work appears in numerous web and print journals, including Adroit, Sou’wester, Threepenny Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Her poems can also be found in several anthologies, including the Best Indie Lit New England anthology. She is the author of the chapbooks Sink and Drift, Creature Feature, and Dear Turquoise, and the forthcoming full-length Abandon.