Coffee Spew

Paradise Drive
Rebecca Foust
Press 53 2015

Reviewed by Bob Wake

Rebecca Foust’s Paradise Drive achieves considerable force by using the precision of a classical poetic form—the sonnet—to portray something that is, by contrast, messy and contemporary: Our post-9/11 American landscape of rapacious materialism and spiritual hunger. Foust’s sonnets give us a California antiheroine named Pilgrim (“Waist-deep in bright ruin, she labors to sing, / wondering if wanting is, after all, all / there is”). When attending posh Marin County cocktail parties, Pilgrim prefers to cloister herself with books in wealthy homeowners’ bathrooms. She is haunted by hardscrabble childhood memories (“Her father smelled like failure because / he could not pay the bills”), as well as more recent hurts such as the bullying of her autistic son (“Yes, Pilgrim was pissed, / her son razzed every day, maybe twice: / ‘Got Ritalin?’ And about what brick does, / on contact, to a child’s perfect face”).

Consumer products function like satirical pop-up ads throughout Paradise Drive: Botox, Jiffy Pop, Tupperware, Adidas, Real Housewives, Manolo stilettos, d-Con, Prius, Land Rover, Escalade. However, when Foust brings us face to face with what appears to be September 11th, 2001 in New York City, in the deeply moving poem “the fire is falling,” the poet’s world is suddenly shorn and diminished—fallen—in lowercase. Ground Zero becomes in Foust’s sonnet a kind of negative theology, leaving unnamed that which is incomprehensible:

a september wedding back at the cape—
three days without kids—then he’ll work
in new york while she flies back
to san francisco alone—a good plan
till she misses her plane—she’s en route
to boston when the fire is falling
and he’s in midtown—the circuits jammed
and she’s holding hands with a stranger
in the qwik-stop—then sitting on the curb
for a long time—for a long time dialing—
the fire still falling when he picks up—
the plume somewhere behind him—the fire
falling—as it always has—this close—
it has to be this close before she sees

At its most playful, Paradise Drive is reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s recent film, Goodbye to Language, which cedes several minutes of screen time to the ennobled perceptions of a dog. In Foust’s sonnet “We Dogs,” a pampered California canine’s heightened senses come alive: “Here, Mt. Tam / compounds and distills the exotic smells / of wildcat spoor steamed on noon trails, / and the creeks leap with salmon in spawn.” The dog’s owner, Pilgrim, will share the animal’s final moments with us in another poem, “Refractory”: “Agonal breath, / the vet said, before apnea and death.” And Pilgrim will be reminded of her own father’s mournful alcoholic demise, subsequently revealed to us in the elegiac “The Truth.”

Rich in literary allusions—many of which are deciphered in the author’s entertaining endnotes—Rebecca Foust’s sonnets work together seamlessly as a book-length narrative. Paradise Drive’s Pilgrim is a complex and flawed everyperson whose quest for “options” is timely and universal: “Maybe the chance / to do an angstrom of good, make beauty / or protest or laughter.”