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2017
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Osborn’s bookended father poems, one set in a video store, the other in a bookstore with a comics section, provide a kind of genesis narrative for all this hero worship, for the tendency to look for heroes at all. The opening poem hints that the father’s anti-heroism (and poor taste in film) may have created the speaker’s desire to search for heroes elsewhere and everywhere. Yet the final poem, “Always on Sundays,” reads as a form of thanks to a father for offering the daughter a religion of used book stores with “fresh comics out every Wednesday.” In this broad definition of heroism, the father qualifies for not one poem but two and becomes a version of what Osborn depicts best: the imperfect hero. Whitaker’s final father poem, in contrast, is fragmented in imagery and syntax, evoking flashes of memory (“fish-pale moon / an evening storm – ”) that dim with time. Whitaker writes with a fire of putting ugly truths on the page and describing what most people don’t even want to think about. Osborn, on the other hand, crafts lighter fare, but still offers edgy social commentary. Both poets explore what it means to survive under duress, whether the stress of daily living or long-term abuse. In this way, both emphasize that adaptation and survival may be the most heroic acts of all. n
“A SEEKER AMONG SEEKERS” a review by Joan Romano Shifflett Rebecca Foust. Paradise Drive. Winston-Salem: Press 53, 2015.
JOAN ROMANO SHIFFLETT is an instructor and writing specialist at the US Naval Academy. She has a PhD from the Catholic University of America, and she is working on a book on Southern American poets, including North Carolina’s Randall Jarrell. REBECCA FOUST’s other books include God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World (Tebot Bach, 2010), a collaboration with artist Lorna Stevens that received a 2010 Foreword Book of the Year Award; All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song (Many Mountains Moving, 2010), which received the 2008 MMM Press Poetry Book Prize; and two chapbooks, Mom’s Canoe (Texas Review Press, 2009) and Dark Card (Texas Review Press, 2008), both winners of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. Foust earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC, and is the recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place and The MacDowell Colony. Her poems have appeared in journals including Hudson Review, Massachusetts Review, Narrative, North American Review, and Sewanee Review, and her prose has appeared in American Book Review, Chautauqua, Poetry Flash, The Rumpus, Tikkun Daily, and other journals. Her essay, “Venn Diagram,” won the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize from The Malahat Review in 2014. Foust lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area as a writer, freelance editor, teacher, and Marin Poetry Center board member.
ABOVE RIGHT Rebecca Foust at her book launch party, Brookstown Inn, WinstonSalem, NC, 24 Apr. 2015
Rebecca Foust has published two award-winning chapbooks, two award-winning poetry collections, and, most recently, Paradise Drive, named the Winner of the 2015 Press 53 Award for Poetry, and surely destined for additional honors. This compelling, sensory-rich narrative, heightened by masterful structure, both external and internal, unfolds in a sonnet sequence about “Pilgrim,” a modern female protagonist on a universal quest for self-discovery. Foust’s description of Anne Bradstreet, “a seeker among seekers,” also applies to Pilgrim: “in love with the world and struggling to maintain the piety demanded by her faith.” Pilgrim’s faith may not be religion-based, but it is a faith in values and goodness, a faith that leads her to a “silent fasting retreat,” a faith that inspires her, while she is at a pretentious charity ball, to think “about Darfur / and God, all that food” even as she is harshly judged for “getting shitfaced / on the Veuve.” It is within this lovable, flawed character, who occasionally has too much champagne and routinely escapes parties to read behind a locked bathroom door, that we discover a modern-day Dante, a soul seeker who yearns to yield the truths of this world. Foust’s genius is in drawing from the traditions of literary history to create a contemporary quest narrative that speaks on multiple levels. In particular, she draws from William Blake for her section titles and chooses the name Pilgrim to invoke John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, thereby creating a valuable framework. Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the title of Foust’s first section, mocks theologain Emanuel Swedenborg’s orthodox view of good and evil. Essentially, Swedenborg is to Blake what