Sunday’s New York Times Book Review lists Small Press Distribution’s top ten sellers for the month of December. In other words, what small press poetry books did people get each other for Christmas?
It is wonderful to see that two of the top three sellers were books from Flood Editions, a Chicago-based press that has consistently put out gorgeous and interesting books. Number three on the SPD list is Graham Foust’s Necessary Stranger, which is Foust’s third book and second on Flood. This is just another piece of evidence that Necessary Stranger was one of the important books that came out last year. Much has already been said about this book in various reviews and blogs (like here, here, here, here and here) and I don’t know if I have anything particularly new to add to the discussion of Stranger except to say that as someone interested in the American short poem, Foust has consistently been one of the most exciting practitioners of the form of the past decade. In terms of predecessors, he seems to have learned a lot from the work of Armantrout in her use fragmentation, and also from Creeley, whose bitten-off syntax Foust has internalized and made his own.
Even if Foust’s poems physically stretch onto a second page, they always feel spare and disjointed, as if a familiar narrative has been exploded and the poem at hand is formed from the shrapnel of that story, making it new and challenging. One aspect of Foust’s work that perhaps hasn’t been commented on enough is his use of humor. While much of his subject matter is dark, dealing with addiction, the vacuity of contemporary human life, and strained interpersonal relations, through his use of titles Foust balances the desperate with the tongue-in-cheek. For example, the first three poems of Stranger take their titles from the first three songs of Van Halen’s 1984 album (“1984,” “Jump” and “Panama). I believe his original plan was to write a series of nine poems, one for each song on the album, and make a chapbook out of them, but I don’t think it ever materialized. Other titles of poems from all three books include “Google,” “Less tourism, more strip mining,” “Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation” and recently appearing in the Nation, “My Graham Foust.” In a poetry so concerned with concision, allowing himself the latitude to include elements of the absurd gives him the opportunity bring levity to his tone. Here are a couple of my favorite poems from Necessary Stranger.
Number One Hit Song
The above is leaf-math,
a high
block of cottonwood.
I am for volume.
I am for tubes in and out of the sick.
If heaven were only
where only
you could hurt you,
I would touch its dead and broadcast
their entire range of breakage.
I would breathe to within
a skin’s-width
of my sleep.
I would make a little nimbus there,
a clear heart for moths to toss against.
Late and unancient, inexact
as hands, I would move
as if by choice into my life.
In the Space Provided
On a near-
suicidally clear
day of wind–
a day like
a day like
television–
I wake to find
that a season
has been detonated.
Planet’s automatic.
That tree’s a gust
of blood.
Foust, Graham. Necessary Stranger. Flood Editions: Chicago. 2007