Rebecca Foust has won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize two years running. Last summer in CBR:15 we reviewed her 2007 award winning debut, Dark Card, a forceful collection of linked poems about her son with Asperger’s syndrome. Foust’s 2008 winning chapbook, Mom’s Canoe, is just out from Texas Review Press. Once again sequenced around a thematic thread—Foust’s upbringing in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania—these are terrific poems, flinty and tough like the quarries and strip mines she writes about and, like her work in Dark Card, devoid of sentimentality and easy emotions. Nothing is left unscarred. “Gills burned, drowned in air …” she writes in “How the Fish Feels.” In “Things Burn Down,” the same air that chokes the unlucky hooked fish is killing us too: “Thick smoke from the papermill / all day and night, understand? No one asked // in those days if that shit could kill you …”
Hardship and loneliness become stark forces of nature in poems like “Allegheny County Winter Day” (“Everyone’s going / or gone. Sunset bleeds / through bare boughs; / snow hollows go blue”) and “The Mountains Come Close When It Rains” (“And say it’s ten below zero, skies gray so long you / forget what blue looks like, and you can’t find a job”). The twenty-four poems in Mom’s Canoe evoke a world rich in novelistic detail. A traffic light is made memorable in “November”: “The traffic / light is wanton, / an exotic / painted parrot / or harlot— // Emerald. / Burnt gold. / Then / throat-catching / scarlet.” And this glorious cascade of childhood images of her mother’s canoe in the collection’s title poem: “Frail origami, vessel of air, / wide shallow saucer suspended where / shallows met shadows near the old dam.”
Coffee Spew 