Tag: Paradise Drive

• 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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• Paradise Drive

  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.”

  April 17, 2015

  Goodbye to Language, Jean-Luc Godard, Paradise Drive, Press 53, Rebecca Foust

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