Leave the Room to Itself

Graham Foust

Selected for the 2003 Sawtooth Poetry Prize by Joe Wenderoth

In Graham Foust’s poems, philosophy and pharmaceuticals gone lyric go shopping—and come home familiarly anonymous, hungry, and in love. Sports arenas, music television, home improvement, cosmetic surgery, weapons of mass destruction, and endless trips to the store—and many other items on America’s long and constant list of perks, pitfalls, and talking points—are all scrutinized and celebrated by the voices that haunt and own this book. At once playful and poker-faced, a cast of entirely plausible and altogether impossible versifiers both honors and mocks their (and our) various states of affairs. Here, politics and aesthetics invade each other’s circuses, and they admit—slyly, sheepishly, or sometimes with a sonic boom, that they were always already each other anyway.

“There are many ways to hear ‘it takes off the top of my head.’ For me, the most important way to hear it is: it makes me suddenly and oddly aware that I am alive—aware that I am simultaneously at the end and the beginning of my power, which is simply to be there and say so. Foust's poems do this for me; I feel akin to the mute struggler that lurks all around these poems—that eludes so many attempts at saying that and where and how he is. The struggle is, in my view, dignified—never self-congratulatory, never self-pitying—and it has produced sounds for us to come back to—sounds for us to set out from.” —Joe Wenderoth, from the introduction

Graham Foust was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. With degrees from Beloit College, George Mason University, and the University at Buffalo, he teaches at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. He and his wife live in Iowa City.

A sample poem from the book

Politics

Leave the room

to itself. Compare it

to a sleeping,

living creature.

Time is the dark-

packed house

of this place,

the luck of the desert

cut

into the floor of the desert.

Everything

is ready.

A light burns

wherever necessary.

Like skin,

like a prison,

each thought’s

an instant ruin.

Leave the room to itself

Here’s a needle. Here is the sea.