Rebecca Foust

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought....Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows....If you can feel that staying human is worthwhile, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them. —George Orwell, 1984

Inspired by a rereading of 1984 during the pandemic and the turbulent years of the 2016-20 Trump administration, Rebecca Foust’s new chapbook, YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR: LOVE POEMS, explores the disturbing parallels between George Orwell's totalitarian dystopia and America's emerging political landscape. Julia and Winston’s love story beats at the heart of Orwell’s book, where a declaration of personal love becomes an act of rebellion and a way to preserve privacy, personal identity, and even reality. These poems believe that holds true now, as well. The book, runner up in the 2024 Backbone Press Contest, was released in October 2024—order here.

Urgent from the outset, Rebecca Foust’s ONLY insists that the only thing worth writing about is everything. Prompted to confront what she does not know, the speaker lists, “Null. All. What’s after death or before.” This book scales the cliff-face of adulthood, that paradoxical ascent in which the longer we live the less we know of life, in which we find that each of us is only ourselves and yet delicately interconnected with everyone, everything, else. These candid lyrics ponder our broken political systems, family (dys)function and parenting challenges, divergent and intersecting identities, the complexities of sexuality and gender, natural refuge and climate catastrophe, and in general what it means to be human in a world that sometimes feels as if it is approaching apocalypse. At the ledge of this abyss, however, Foust reminds us of the staggering beauty of life, the legacies of survival in the echoes of care that outlast us: “I came / to the canyon rim and saw // how best to carry you: I let the stone go.”

"The ticking is the bomb,” Nick Flynn says, and the idea of events from our genetic, cultural, historic, and experienced past—coiled and waiting to explode in our lives—lies at the core of this new collection, winner of the 2018 Swan Scythe Press Chapbook Contest founded by Sandra McPherson. THE UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE BIN poems ignite a long, sparking fuse about contemporary culture, society, and social justice issues now dividing family, community, and country.

In Rebecca Foust’s splendid book-length sonnet sequence, Paradise Drive, we come upon a Pilgrim contemplating the deadly sins while hiding out in the bathrooms at some of Marin County, California’s swankiest parties. As the Pilgrim swaggers into an idiosyncratic, believable, frail spirituality, her unmediated, un-medicated new life emerges. The sonnets of this new life are jagged, fresh, and formed in only the way a stunningly skilled poet can craft them. Foust drives her Keatsian sensibility straight into the 21st Century of terrorism and autism, divorce and yoga, soldiers and syringes, booze and valet parking, determined to prove that truth makes beauty. Not only is Paradise Drive a magnificent achievement, it’s a deep comfort as well. —Molly Peacock, author of The Second Blush: Poems

“Spring is springing as I experience what the author and artist have given me and I am moved to recollect, in tranquility, as the poet said, all the infinite gifts I’ve received and might yet find in the glorious world, both human and otherwise. Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens are to be congratulated and profoundly thanked. Made my day. So, thanks, and more thanks.” — William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky, The Willow Field, and Owning It All and producer of A River Runs Through It.

All That Gorgeous, Pitiless Song brims with amplitude and vitality. By virtue of her unsentimental warmth of spirit, Foust brings to life an immense range of experience and feeling. This poet’s emotional intelligence correlates, too, with her formal skill, that unique talent for phrase and rhythm with which she makes a whole world palpable, from the hugest events that mark a life to those moments as subtle as ‘some nuance you knew once like breath.’ Rebecca Foust is a superb poet, and All That Gorgeous, Pitiless Song is a tremendous book.”  — Peter Campion

Candy Plant. Paper Mill. Strip Mine. In Mom’s Canoe, Rebecca Foust recovers “each loved thing lost, sieved/ with bitter salt and ash.” She holds local myths, fossil records, family lore and memory to the brutal and compassionate light of poetry. — Robin Becker

Centered on the experience of raising a special child and the cruelty we inflict on difference, this collection of poems will break and heal your heart. Dark Card explores themes related to raising a child with Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild autism disorder.