Rebecca Foust: from Altoona to all-out author,
Ross poet's amazing success by Jannie Dresser

February 5, 10:35 AMSF Poetry Examiner

Foust and her twin brother were the first out of five siblings to go up to college, indeed they were the first generation ever to go. "My parents had no money for college," so she applied and won full scholarship to attend two prestigious Eastern schools, Smith and Dartmouth. Her cousin had passed through Northampton en route to her grandpa‘s funeral and he told her that "the Smith campus was pretty." After graduating from Smith, she received another full scholarship--this time bringing her west to attend Stanford Law School. She practiced white collar criminal defense for ten years with two San Francisco law firms, then went freelance to defend indigent criminal appeals. In the meantime, she started a family.

After her third child was diagnosed with autism, she left her law practice to care for her children and volunteer in grassroots political organizing for students with learning disabilities in the Ross and Tamalpais high school districts. By 2007, her community work had become a full-time job for which she received the California Golden Bell and Ross community service awards.

Although she has written all her life, the publishing world was unknown to her until 2007. "I’d never seen a literary journal or contemporary poetry book and it never occurred to me to try to publish my work." She submitted her first poem to the 36th Annual Writers’ Digest Contest and won first place; three more poems received honorable mentions. “I signed up for every class and workshop I could find and started sending out work and was lucky to get a good response.“ (Editor’s aside: I don’t think luck had much to do with it.) Linda Watanabe McFerrin, writer for the San Francisco Chronicle and Bay Nature, first met Becky in her “Life into Literature” workshop at Book Passage in Corte Madera. She remembers Foust as “soft spoken, yet intense . . . . even then I thought her voice was dazzling, incisive, precise.”

Foust’s first chapbook, Dark Card, was about raising a son with Asperger’s syndrome. The chapbook received the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize and was released by Texas Review Press in 2008. Mom’s Canoe won the same prize the following year and was released in 2009. Because the book is devoted to her parents, and most of her success has been in the years since they passed away, Foust says she “is sad they didn’t get to see me graduate.” Mom’s Canoe was a way to acknowledge them and what they meant in her life, she says. “My mom was a huge reader and took me to the bookmobile every Friday night. My love of poetry probably stems from listening to her read poems aloud from an anthology called Magic Casements, which I still have.”

Foust's first full-length book, All That Gorgeous, Pitiless Song won this year’s Many Mountains Moving Prize and will be released at the Association of Writing & Writing Programs’ conference to be held in Denver in April. Another full-length book, God, Seed, a collaboration with artist Lorna Stevens, is about environmental topics and is to be released by Tebot Bach Press later this year.

Foust has enjoyed amazing success in a relatively short period of time, the obvious result of an amazing devotion to her family as well as passion for work and for what it inspires her work: history, nature, relationships, poetry itself. Her poems sizzle with an awareness of life’s fragility and the importance of paying attention and honoring the deeply human impulses of those who struggle to survive and overcome poverty, joblessness, emotional turbulence. There is something real in her poetry that is all too often missing in poems that are simply rants, therapeutic confessionals, or lit-theory inspired experimentations; any reader with a taste for the truth would enjoy this accessible beautiful work.

Rebecca Foust has a number of public events lined up this spring including an engagement at the 2nd Annual Marin Autism Lecture Series, on February 9, from 12-2 in San Rafael; a reading and talk with collaborator Lorna Stevens at San Francisco’s Center for the Book on February 25; a reading at the University of California Santa Barbara’s College of Creative Studies Literature Symposium on March 3; and in April, a joint reading with Molly Fisk, a writer and teacher in the California foothills whose “boot camps,” Foust attended. They will be on the roster of the Poetry Flash reading series hosted by Moe’s Bookstore in Berkeley at 7:30 on April 1.

REVIEW OF MOM'S CANOE BY REBECCA FOUST (ROSS)

Mom’s Canoe by Rebecca Foust (Texas Review Press, Huntsville, TX: 2008) 25 poems, 48 pages, $12.95, winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize, 2008. Cover design by Lorna Stevens and Richard Lang with photo taken by Robert J. Foust.

Mom’s Canoe is a battered and broken vessel of transcendence, both metaphorically as it comes to represent lives in the impoverished towns of the Appalachian Mountain Range (more specifically the Allegheny Mountains), as well as a symbol of the narrator’s escape through creative expression and relocation:

You can turn round and round and round

and always see mountains. Blue Knob,

Wopsononock, Brush, Davis and Lock

usurp the sky and conjure its seasons

--July’s heavy wet sails, stars slung low

like lanterns, lily-thronged ditches down

in the cove. Winter’s white bowl piles drift

upon drift, the air a thin gruel the men sip,

waiting for Blue Law Noon. Their coats

exhale wet wool and wood smoke,

their feet beat a work boot tattoo; laid off,

laid off, laid off, the mines mined out

and the Railroad dead, engines rusted to tracks.

Bitter cold at the root and bought too dear,

a hundred-year oak is two week’s cordwood,

a doe, meat roped to the hood of your car.

Well, that is half of the first poem in the book, “Allegheny Mountain Bowl,” and sets tone and themes for this splendid 24-poem chapbook.

Mom’s Canoe was a title I struggled with at first; after reading so many long "poetic" titles, contrived to be elusively evocative, I wanted to make more out of this simple possessed object: ‘mom’s canoe’ is just that, a small rowboat that spelled freedom and ease to the author’s mother.

Remember how it glowed like honey in summer

rubbed with beeswax and turpentine

against leaks, cracks, weather and time.

All your housekeeping went into that canoe,

then you floated high, bow lifted,

arced up like flight, all magic, power,

evening light. You j-stroking,

side-slipping, eddying out, frugal

with movement, all without effort,

just like you walked and ran.

The book is dedicated to Foust’s deceased parents, but there is an unwritten dedication to the people and landscape of her hometown, Altoona, Pennsylvania. “Altoona to Anywhere” signals the second theme of the book, the first having to do with family and community in an area facing joblessness, limited resources, closed-down shops. This second theme cries “get me out of here!” and the narrator/author’s voice shifts to mock desperation and challenge to herself:

Go ahead, aspire to transcend

your hardscrabble roots, bootstrap

the life you dream on,

escape the small-minded tyranny

of your small-minded Midwestern

coalmining town.

The poem continues with the persistence of that town as it is carried within:

Beware DNA; it will out or be outed,

and you’ll find yourself back

where you started, back home,

unable to refute the logic of blood and bone

you’ll slip, and pick up Velveeta

instead of brie.

What I like best about Mom’s Canoe is that, even as it rejects the limitations of the world it describes in details like the Boyer Candy plant going dark or in poems like “Things Burn Down,” it embraces much about that world: its natural ecology, its history, its given moments of love and pleasures. “Indian Pipe,” which turns out to be about the poet’s mother as she slips towards death, begins with a poetic yet precise description of an unusual plant:

Wild woodland flower found

only in leap year at midnight

in moss and fern fen. Rare,

lucent and cave dwelling fish.

Pale, cool glow, something

hothouse or orchid or mushroom

that melts at touch . . .

The best poems dance between the natural and human worlds, gaining inspiration and sometimes uplift through settings of the physical environment, then earning gravitas in descriptions of existential human moments as they are caught, for example, in things actually spoken by those most affected by the cost of survival. In “Things Burn Down,” we hear a terrible questioning refrain:

. . . Papap hauled ash

or laid brick; he was skilled with a trowel

but there was no work, understand? Don’t ask

what keeps a man from filling his flask

with what he’d divined from the wells he’d drilled

with his own hands, or why Dad’s damask

was a gray square he hacked on to clear ash

from his throat. Thick smoke from the papermill

all day and night, understand? No one asked

in those days if that shit could kill you. As track

spread in congeries from the repair yards, fields

disappeared. Cinder and soot, more soot--damask

was work in that town. Mom found a dog lashed

to a tree, starved to bone. Too many mouths to feed,

do you understand that?

By the end of the book, the poet has earned a sign-off poem that lacks the substantive texture of earlier poems and almost evaporates off the page as the reader is made aware that the author has indeed left town. Its lingering image is of traffic lights burning with the colors of a tropical bird, not a bird one would find in Altoona, Pennsylvania, but the kind one hopes the author will discover as she makes her way in the world of poetry and new horizons.