paper • 96 pages • 15.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-945588-17-4

Forgive the Body This Failure

Blas Falconer

Blas Falconer’s poem “A man and a woman touched” from Forgive the Body This Failure was featured in The New York Times Magazine.

On Washington Independent Review of Books’ September 2018 Best Books List.

A collection of poems that faces personal losses to explore the human sense of impermanence and to cherish what we must relinquish.

Engaging the past and the present, these poems attempt to reconcile loss and longing while also seeking to understand our own impermanence. Written in a plain-spoken voice, they are meditative, elegiac and tender.

“Heaven” from Forgive the Body This Failure

How will
I get

there? How
will I ever know how

to get
there, my son

asks, sobbing
suddenly, months

after, if
you don't let

me see
them die.

About the Author

Praise by Victoria Chang
Praise by Rigoberto González
Reviewed in Chapter 16

"...Falconer's poems are sparse, beautiful, and breathtaking..."-Victoria Chang
"...These arresting poems move with the complex currents of familial relationships, the strains of joy, love, and loss...An exquisite collection!"-Rigoberto González
"Growing from youth to maturity means, among other things, becoming reconciled to imperfection. With time and living, the illusion of limitless possibility gives way to an acceptance of inevitable failure and frailty. The poems in Blas Falconer’s third collection, Forgive the Body This Failure, are informed by the deep empathy and generosity of spirit that can come with this acceptance...."Read the full review

Also by Blas Falconer

The Foundling Wheel