Letters to Guns. Brendan Constantine. Red Hen, 2009.

Brendan Constantine’s Letters to Guns is a kinetic, boyishly imaginative, and exuberant debut that, for all its humor and hairpin turns, remains a starkly candid document of our age, especially of the violence that pollutes our collective unconscious.

The book’s opening poem, “One Million Years BC,” is emblematic of Constantine’s style, which is often enjambed, wry, even demotic at times, yet transcends the flat irony that mars the work of many emerging poets. Part creation narrative, part surreal exercise, “One Million Years BC” shows us mountains that “drooled fluorescent paint” and trees with “crude tattoos” that “dropped suitcases full/of money on the ground.” This purposefully anachronistic blend of the primordial and urban is certainly worth a chuckle, but upon further examination, it becomes clear that Constantine’s motives are dire; the mad jumble disassociates us from our quaint expectations and replaces them with a universe where “the stars held each other/at gunpoint.” If readers are willing to take the leap these images require—from the chaos of “valleys filled with loose change/and lost sunglasses” to the “flasks of warm lava”—then Constantine will hold them captive for the rest of this wild ride.

There is no shortage of wit in Constantine’s poems, but as a reader progresses through the collection’s later sections, such instances—like nervous laughter on a good first date—melt into a genuine intimacy with the subjects at hand. We see this in “The Missing,” which begins with the Seinfeldian observation that “as far as I can tell, they’ve stopped/putting the faces of lost children/on milk cartons” beside the brand’s spokes-cow. Rather than building toward a punch line, though, the speaker explores the elegiac, and can’t help but imagine “the children,/thousands of them, standing/in a red field beneath a red sun/holding hands or stroking/her glossy coat.” This is also evident in “Kink,” a poem enumerating bizarre sexual fetishes that winds itself into a ruminant lyricism: “Most of us must see a thing to know/we need it. Even the blind learn shapes/of yearning. A pacemaker is small as a kiss/& works quietly in the dark of the body.”

Letters to Guns also contains several poems marked by their restrained narrative sincerity, such as “And Abel,” a succinct and lush dramatic monologue in the voice of the biblical figure. “What my father didn’t know/wouldn’t fit into the sky,” Abel confesses, and a sense of quiet uncertainty pervades. We learn less about the first family’s relationships than we do about the loss of Eden and the ferocious cycles of a world where a ram devours a mother viper as her “snakelets/broke their supple shells.” This is indeed a hardscrabble world, a world of grit and instinct, but for all of the poem’s allusive force, the mythic fratricide is ultimately exposed as being the result of petty jealousy rather than a cosmic fall from grace.

Our cultural obsession for firearms is the focus of the eight interconnected epistles that thematically anchor Letters to Guns. From Chinese dynamite to French Revolution muskets to a Washington, D.C. drive-by that obliterates “the purple hush of a morning/that should have been,” these letters explore the senselessness of our vengeance and thirst for power with no small dose of gallows’ humor. What makes these distinct yet interwoven letter-poems so rich and inventive, however, is that they flirt with the ridiculous; the letters to guns are not written by fervent militia devotees or lifers at an asylum, but by other inanimate objects. “Letter V,” for example, is written to a Coggswell and Harrison double barrel elephant gun by a grove of flame trees in Kenya, while “Letter VII” is written to a Taurus Model .38 Special by a woman’s flannel night-gown.

If a reader can suspend disbelief even momentarily, these rich personifications appear increasingly less absurd when juxtaposed with the absurd human insistence for violence, be it a drunken domestic conflict or a revolution that is, as “Letter III” informs us, like “all rebellions the same: once they start/no one can remember why or agree/how they should end.” Such poems not only address the harrowing reality of our moment as two wars continue to rage six years after that now-infamous banner proclaimed “Mission Accomplished,” but they also probe the very circuitry of our being. For that, Letters to Guns is a remarkable first book.

—Adam Tavel

Brendan Constantine is a Southern California poet and champion for the literary arts. He teaches at the Winward School and is well known for his workshops at Venice's Beyond Baroque. He performs his work across the United States.(more)