Only

by Rebecca Foust

Overview

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, 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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781954245297
Publisher:	Four Way Books
Publication date:	09/15/2022
Series:	Stahlecker Selections
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Rebecca Foust is the author of Paradise Drive (Press 53, 2015), winner of the Press 53 Award for Poetry and the Poetry Society of Virginia Book Award; All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song (Many Mountains Moving, 2010), winner of the Many Mountains Moving Book Prize; and God, Seed: Poetry & Art about the Natural World (Tebot Bach, 2010), a collaboration with artist Lorna Stevens that won the Foreword Book of the Year Award for Poetry. Her chapbooks are The Unexploded Ordnance Bin (Swan Scythe Press, 2020) winner of the Swan Scythe Chapbook Award, and Mom's Canoe (Texas Review Press 2009) and Dark Card (Texas Review Press 2008), winners of the Robert Phillips Poetry Prize in consecutive years. Foust's poems appear widely, in The Hudson Review, Narrative, Ploughshares, POETRY, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Recognitions include the 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry judged by Kaveh Akbar, the C.P. Cavafy and James Hearst Poetry Prizes, a 2017-19 Marin County Poet Laureateship, and fellowships from The Frost Place, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Sewanee Writers' Conference.

Read an Excerpt

Only
O Love this happened or it did not.
In a room with green walls

my son was born. The cord was torn
too soon, so they cut off

his head to save his heart. He lived
for a long time.

For a long time there was no breath or cry.
When finally he spoke,

he spoke the wide, whorled leaves of corn.
He spoke the crickets

in clusters beneath the sheaves, he sang
the soil in. He sang the wind

in the dune and hush of ebb tide. Some say
he died. Some say he died.

Table of Contents

Prompt 3

Remember

Dream of the Rood 7

Thirteen 9

Parts of Speech 10

Exsultate jubilate 11

Remember 12

Dawn Piece 13

Cocktail Hour 14

Self-Improvement 16

Not the thing but the fossil of the thing 17

Spring Is 18

Cake 19

Night Skating 20

Tines 23

Let Deer 25

Compline 26

Only

Only 29

The unexploded ordnance bin 30

Collaborator 33

Perseids 35

Everything Golden Is Spilled 37

Like Birders 38

Reflection 39

Saturn-Peach 40

Paean 41

Lies I Told My Third Child 43

Abeyance 44

Echo 46

Watershed

Train out of Altoona 49

Election Returns 2016 52

Sit with Me 54

Little Brown Bat 57

Blame 60

Vehicular 61

Iconostasis 62

Guernica 63

The Bugler Responds to Mary 64

Blackout 65

Watershed 67

I Learn to Field Strip an M-16 68

Epitaph after Vallejo 71

Dream of the Rood, Reprise 72

The Fox 73

Notes

Editorial Reviews

07/18/2022

The meditative and melodious second collection from Foust (Paradise Drives) relishes in the daily discoveries that make life endlessly mysterious. “Prompt” begins with instructions from poet Stephen Dunn: “Write only what you absolutely do not know, not what you’re merely not sure of.” The poem continues, “Null. All. What’s after death or before./ Where my old dog is now, my mother,/ my father—not the ashes clumped/ in a box, but the mad licking/ and tail-beating and the gaze,/ dense with devotion, of iris-less eyes.” Foust is in conversation elsewhere too, as in “Dawn Piece” (after “Night Piece” by Stanley Kunitz), which beautifully asks: “Love,// believe it is only my mouth seeking the last marrow/ memory before night bleeds out// into the neap-tide drawn dawn, and let me sleep on...” The author has a gift for rhythmic imagery, such as in “Dream of the Rood”: “The town’s reason, gone. Stripper pit/strawberries/stripper pit/corn./ Coke-caked smokestacks, brick pink/ in morning sun,” or “spring still half on the spool.” These poems finely weave contrasting subjects, sensually recollecting earlier life while casting a hard, penetrating look at identity, politics, family, and the climate crisis. In these beautifully crafted and ecstatic pages, Foust celebrates the strength of memory and the interconnectedness of all people. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"In Only, her luminous new collection of poems, Rebecca Foust's gifts are in full flower. Richly imagistic and achingly lyrical, these poems wrestle with the big questions-religion, immigration, climate change, politics, parenting, autism, and death-all on a deeply intimate level. Like an impressionist painter, she uses light to capture the immediacy of the present, the passage of time. Foust's most remarkable gift is showing us '… the world as it is: gorgeous in its mortal wound.'"
-Ellen Bass

"Rebecca Foust's new book, Only, is her most masterful work to date. Here are forty-two poems full of music, precision, and what range-from the haunted thrill 'through moonlight and smoke' of skating on a lake at night, to field-stripping an M-16, to sitting with loved ones through births and final illnesses alike. In Foust's hands the hard work of memory-each fossil, each word and gesture-is sometimes balanced and sometimes in tension with the echoes of what we must lose. 'I remember all the words,' she writes in one poem; and in the next, 'I let the stone go.' Insoluble, this give and take, and yet the music made from the gifts and griefs of a life is Rebecca Foust's deepest source both of clarity and of nuance, 'the language of living, and its aftermath.'"
-David Baker

"The poems in Rebecca Foust’s tremendous new collection, Only, attend to the fundamental act of giving shape to a life, while accounting for joy, grief, love and family. With narrative skill and lyric intensity, political alertness and imaginative flair, Foust is writing some of the most important poems of our day. Every poem in this book offers what Foust describes as moments of “seeing something new, and listening, really listening.” I’m convinced that we’ll be listening to these poems for a long time to come."
 -Peter Campion
 

From the Publisher