Courtney, Brandon: Inadequate Grave

Inadequate Grave by Brandon Courtney (YesYes Books, paperback)

Publication Date: June 15, 2017

Publisher Marketing: Poetry. Brandon Courtney's INADEQUATE GRAVE spins together like slits on a zoetrope, animating a single, tragic moment: the drowning of a best friend in the Arabian gulf during the Iraq War. Mulling over that moment the way only a mind under grief's sway can, INADEQUATE GRAVE is elegy-in-action. And in the tradition of great nautical writing, Courtney, regardless of how angry or devastated, never evades the sea's truly sublime power: "nothing / has changed: the water that drowns is still more / beautiful than the lungs it / enters." INADEQUATE GRAVE is both a farewell letter to the dead and a love letter to what killed him.

INADEQUATE GRAVE is the inaugural title in the new Companion series of chapbooks from YesYes Books. At the heart of the pocket-sized volumes in the Companion Series is the acknowledgement that books are sometimes all that connects us to and keeps us in this world. With the purchase of each pocket-sized book, the same book will be donated to a veterans organization or an organization that serves at-risk youth.