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.
 

Praise for YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR: Love Poems

First Place in California, 2025 National Federation of Press Women Prize

In You Are Leaving the American Sector Rebecca Foust offers her readers a new Declaration of Independence, one that offers a riposte to the white Christian nationalism of contemporary American conservatism, a rejection of today’s robber barons and their dreams of empire. I’m signing on. — Lee Rossi, Rhino, 3/29/25 

The wonder of You Are Leaving the American Sector is that it maintains poetic integrity while conveying complex narrative, lists, and streams of information across its three sections . . .[and] also writes history forward . . . It’s a modern J’Accuse written in verse. – Rick Mullin, Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, 4/17/25

[F]ormally adventurous...Foust's precise language is the ultimate rebuke to forces seeking to erase 'our shared & stored history'...Foust’s new chapbook couldn’t be more timely. — Joyce Peseroff, On the Seawall, 3/11/25

How much more strongly does this resonate in 2025.
— Rebecca Foster, Bookish Beck, 3/2/25