Anne Harding Woodworth on Rebecca Foust

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You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems
by Rebecca Foust, Backbone Press, 2024

 

These captivating poems aren’t your usual love poems. They are a combination of insightful, observational, political, calming and enraging poems. In them, love becomes something bigger than itself, something different from love’s traditionally perceived emotion.

 

The love affair between Winston Smith and Julia—remember them in Orwell’s 1984?—is anything but usual. Poet Rebecca Foust has a way of horrifying a reader and making a reader smile at history and literature, and Foust’s skill at using them. In this collection, the poet blends and parallels 1984’s Oceania and the present-day United States. The first section is titled “World State of Ford 632/USA 2016-2024.” Whether we know it or not, Big Brother is watching. Look at this excerpt from the prose-poem, “2016-20”:

 

Big Brother’s reign was a loud catastrophe . . . it was little kids
dead at the border . . . it was a Muslim travel ban & whole nations dissed
as shitholes . . . in the end it was our Capitol under actual siege

 

One has to read this whole poem for a concise history of those four years.

 

Foust does a masterful job of blending the happenings of the most recent years in the U.S. with Orwell’s vision of what he thought the 1980s would be like. Perhaps these poems express the idea that love will abide. Orwell envisioned a love in 1984 that would not be romantic in the traditional sense. Love of country, also, was distorted from what is traditional patriotism. Here in these poems, one senses that the poet believes in, almost loves, her work. She seems to have a rebellious nature that gives her a chance to expose with love her outrage at what is happening, just as Winston & Julia eventually love each other in defiance of an authoritarian regime.

 

A dream quality permeates the world that Foust has created. Oceania and the U.S. are conflated. And it doesn’t matter. Water has been restricted. In “Prologue: Water,” the speaker says,” I dream / of a green world,” of rain, of ferns—and all of earth becomes a dream. And when that world is infiltrated by the Covid Pandemic, there is a new way of looking at things. And so we enter a dystopia of sorts. Sometimes Julia speaks. Sometimes, Winston. And sometimes—maybe always—Foust, creator of this fascinating composite.

 

Like Julia in the “Plague,” Foust laments,

 

I could not fathom those numbers      or imagine
so many        birds in the world
nor feral cats          but maybe I only dreamt them.

 

In the poem “Where This Is Leading,” Foust looks at past, present and future. She looks back to when “Winston takes pride in his work” at the Ministry of Truth. She then goes into the present “when our leader / tells obvious lies” and back to a further past when

 

Goebbels understood how the baldest lies can, through
repetition & dissemination, be woven

 

into something that looks & feels real—Facebook does
it in a keystroke.

 

She brings the present back with Facebook, but she closes this poem by asking: “How can a future exist if we can erase or revise the past?

 

Speaking of which, she stays in the present with the poem “Rally Insurrection” with its epigraph: “news bulletin edited by Truth Social formerly known as The Ministry of Truth.” In this poem, many words, like the original title, are crossed out and replaced with words more acceptable to present-day leadership. There is a love affair with Big Brother taking place in the midst of national decline. Winston’s job is to revise history to make things look good—the way labor statistics should look good in 2025. This poem—more or less an erasure poem, or perhaps a cross-out poem—sits on a page, beautifully composed and inciting the reader’s rage. It does not mention the pardon of the Capitol Building insurrectionists, but it lacks nothing in infuriating impact. Not a love poem, but a poem of love.

 

There is a story here in this collection, based on 1984, but Foust never forgets that she is telling the story in poetry, not the prose of fiction. Nor is she writing about flowers and sunsets, though there is lovely lyricism in many of her lines. No, Foust is rather writing about subjects that don’t normally find themselves in poems, especially love poems. Her vocabulary includes words such as abortion, birth control, the separation of church and state, cowering senators, and, of course, lies. This is what makes the collection so filled with human emotion and passion. It is today’s world, as it pays homage to the past, which was once a frightening future.