Tag: Lorna Stevens

• The Unexploded Ordnance Bin

  The Unexploded Ordnance Bin
  Rebecca Foust
  Swan Scythe Press 2019

  Reviewed by Bob Wake

  Rebecca Foust’s The Unexploded Ordnance Bin is a ferocious work of poetry. The chapbook’s title and ominous cover design (by artist Lorna Stevens) connote urgency and dread. Its thirty poems, touching on a variety of charged topics and poetic forms, all share Foust’s fierce intelligence, sharpened wit, and an abiding reverence for the natural world and our place in it. The title poem begins like a Hitchcock movie about a family excursion that turns darkly comic with menace:

  our son found the hollow shell
  snub-nosed & finned
  & looking like an Acme cartoon bomb
  where we raked for clams
  he wanted to keep it
  & we wanted to let him

  

  An author’s note chillingly informs us that U.S. coastal regions “harbor millions of pounds of dumped munitions” from military training exercises. The family in the poem visits the local police station to dispose of the shell. The mother is left discomforted. A chain-reaction of metaphors follows. She is haunted by her son’s autism and wonders “what it would look like / the bin for safe disposal of genes / that can ruin children.” These lines pack the kind of gut-punch that Rebecca Foust’s work never shies away from. She has addressed her son’s autism in poems over the years, at times with grace and understanding, and at other times with cosmic fury.

  A triptych of poems, “spec house foundation cut into ridge,” “The Deer,” and “Vehicular” depict the effects of environmental and habitat destruction. Readers might be familiar with the experience of being behind the wheel of a car and striking a deer on a highway or rural road. “The Deer” slows down the moment of impact like a forensic examination of the Zapruder film:

  It came mid-sentence, the blow so nearly not a blow, the light
  shattered and flung into the fog, scattered shards
  blooming chrysanthemum then dissolving away,
  a Roman candle illuming the night

  In the poem titled “after the dream act is revoked,” the refrain of “what can i do” begins a process of assessing our privilege and our community (“the people / I know are mostly decent / if catatonic with abundance & consumption & god / & their screens”). The prognosis is grim: “when will we admit the pogrom is here.” Some of the strongest work in The Unexploded Ordnance Bin focuses on the human cost of our immigration policies. “Requiem Mass for the Yuma Fourteen” memorializes the fourteen Mexicans who died of exposure in 2001 while trying to cross the Arizona desert into the United States. The poem is a villanelle, a classic form distinguished by its incantatory repetition of phrases. The rigor of the form combines with Foust’s unadorned language to create a biblical evocation of grief. The opening three stanzas:

  Beyond the border they could smell the rain.
  It smelled like freedom. Freedom and home.
  The desert composes its requiem.

  The oldest was sixty, his grandson thirteen.
  One wore new jeans, one carried a comb.
  Beyond the border they could smell the rain.

  They got lost, then they lost their water. The sun
  was a furnace blast. Dust. Thirst. Delirium,
  the desert composing its requiem.

  As Foust showed in her 2015 book-length sonnet sequence, Paradise Drive, she is skillful at linking poems thematically. The third, and final, section of The Unexploded Ordnance Bin returns to family with a series of deeply personal poems on gender and identity charting her now-adult daughter’s transgender journey. “Shall I mourn one, seeing the other?” she asks in “Moon.”

  March 5, 2020

  2018 Swan Scythe Press Chapbook Award, Alfred Hitchcock, DREAM Act, immigration policy, Lorna Stevens, Paradise Drive, Poetry, Rebecca Foust, Swan Scythe Press, The Unexploded Ordnance Bin, transgender, Yuma fourteen, Zapruder film

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• God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World

  God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World
  Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens
  Tebot Bach 2010

  Reviewed by Bob Wake

  

  Lavish is the word that comes to mind when beholding God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World (Tebot Bach, 2010) by poet Rebecca Foust and artist Lorna Stevens. Well established in their respective mediums, Foust and Stevens’ collaboration in God, Seed is one of those felicitous combustions of text (forty-three poems) and illustration (thirty full-color images) that result in a brilliant hothouse hybrid.

  Readers should prepare themselves for sensory overload if not an outright short-circuit when experiencing a two-page spread of, say, Stevens’ lush eye-popping watercolor of a parsimmon opposite Foust’s sensual accompanying poem, “Parsimmons” (“ … rich river pudding, plush and pulp, / soft-slide swallow delight / and sweet, sweet”).

  Conversely, later on, we are chilled to the bone by Stevens’ austere black brushwork depicting galloping bison that mimics the timeless mysteries of a prehistoric cave drawing. Foust’s chastising poem is “Last Bison Gone” (“We love what we love / in the scientific way, efficient, empiric, / vicious, too much …). Thus are the contrasting poles of God, Seed established: rapturous pleasure in nature’s bounty on the one hand, while, on the other, rapacious misuse and abuse of all that humanity surveys.

  Rebecca Foust’s poetry has always struck at the heart of hard truths. Her first two tough-minded chapbooks (consecutive winners of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize in 2007 and 2008) were reviewed favorably in our online pages. Dark Card, Foust’s debut, shook a righteous fist at doctors and gods alike for the plight of her son, diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. Mom’s Canoe, the follow-up, bracingly recaptured the poet’s own childhood growing up in the depressed strip-mining region of western Pennsylvania.

  Although ostensibly casting a wider impersonal net in God, Seed, it is a testament to Foust’s raw unflinching truth-telling that a poem like “Frog”—about genetically mutated amphibians in a PCB-poisoned pond—spirals instead toward the son whom we remember from Dark Card:

  Still, sleeping,
  I dreamt of my son,
  his genes expressed

  not as autism, but as
  four thumbs on two
  extra hands

  and I want to blame
  someone. I want
  to drain that pond.

  God, Seed respects and encourages full immersion in the world—politically and personally—an attainable if too often lost connection to our surroundings. The poem “Now,” for instance, erases all borders between our bodies and nature’s enraptured seasonal rebirth: “… places in the body’s uncharted waters, new worlds / lying green and deep off winter’s bow // and now, spring. Bone-ache thaw, wind sough / through snow-scoured woods, bud swell …”

  And yet, lest we fall prey to the ecstasy of hubris, the final poem in Foust and Stevens’ God, Seed, “Perennial,” gives nature the last word by writing us out of the picture altogether: “When you’re gone, it won’t matter to the musk rose / twining the old trellis over the eaves. Willow / will continue to pour her yellow-green waterfall // next to forsythia, one half-tone better on the scale / of bright …”

  October 17, 2010

  God/Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World, Lorna Stevens, Rebecca Foust

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