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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

unexploded 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.”

Paradise Drive

Published April 17, 2015 Literature , Poetry Leave a Comment
Tags: Goodbye to Language, Jean-Luc Godard, Paradise Drive, Press 53, Rebecca Foust

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.”

God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World

Published October 17, 2010 Autism , Literature , Memoir , Poetry 3 Comments
Tags: God/Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World, Lorna Stevens, Rebecca Foust

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 …”

Mom’s Canoe

Published February 23, 2009 Literature , Poetry 2 Comments
Tags: Allegheny Mountains, Asperger's Syndrome, Dark Card, Mom's Canoe, Rebecca Foust, Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize, Texas Review Press

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.”