Graham Foust. Necessary Stranger. Flood Editions, 2007.

Review by Matthew M. Gagnon

"Look at the sky, go / back inside," opens Graham Foust's first poem, "1984," echoing a book of the same title by George Orwell, as well as a song by Van Halen. These lines are emblematic of a larger trajectory that runs throughout Foust's third collection of poems: the interiority of physical and mental experience defined by a language of negativity (as in the profuse usage of words such as "not," "never," "can't," "don't," and the prefix "un" that acts to interrogate what gets said in a poem) and associative leaps that challenge immediate semantic sense. All this is done within a formal environment of relying on short lines, enjambment, white space, and a whole arsenal of strange verbal textures juxtaposed to embody the poems.

In Necessary Stranger, the titles of poems alone provide a frame from which they can be read as a rhetorical questioning of our disparate social spaces and the anxieties produced by them. While this questioning isn't so much explicitly marshaled by a "direct treatment of the thing," it is done, on the other hand, with a sense of linguistic metamorphosis: "When that glass cocoons water // you dream wells so deep / they've stars (Bulimia)." Or also consider from "A Note On Ontology":

Our voices are all salt.

Our words keep ramming

into nothing into masks.

The sky is tar is grass is trees.

The ground is cloud is cold

is called goodbye.

In this environment, we become aware of the instability of language, how one word can immediately be exchanged for another, or in another way, how context can be readily shifted. The word "ramming" seems indicative of a blunt dispossession of the contours of our speech habits and how these carry over as communicative failures or insufficiencies. In this sense, the reality the poems presuppose is highlighted in one of the epigraphs at the beginning of the book drawn from Emily Dickinson: "Things are not what they." Foust's poems amplify this statement by conjuring a possible space where emotive and physical elements of a lived life qualify as a constellation of philosophical speculations. This constellation can be best viewed as a process of thought through the landscapes that make up our fleeting identities, which can be contested spaces of paradox and indeterminacy:

This world is conclusion. On a clear day, you can go

blind. The unknown is almost

interesting, with its infinite I'm-not-

kidding . Who are you.

("Interstate Eighty")

This stanza begins as a recasting of a Dickinson poem, "This world is not conclusion," and employs a clear rebuttal to the initial statement, ending with a question that is not so much a question rather than a demand to know. By the quick turn of a couple of lines, the speaker is able to create a state of confusion where blindness and the unknown can bounce off each other as echo and as affirmation. This particular poem ends with the oddly phrased, "There's no beginning to decay," as a nod towards a reality of flux that is juxtaposed with the "they're only facts," of the poem.

Another way to put Necessary Stranger into context is to look at how many of the poems act to unsettle the reader's idea of semantic sense and logic. In a poem such as "Herein," the speaker states: "You look up-and-gutted- / of waves." Then the speaker commands and states: "Afford morning. You are blind / as a mouth. // You are / inconsequentially shrill." This movement, here, gives the pronoun "you" a doubleness that can function as a direct address to the reader and as interchangeable with the speaker of the poem. The density of the phrasing allows for ambiguity that can't be easily resolved, but put into a kind of register that can construct multiple meanings.

As the poem "Day Job" states: "The unconscious is structured / like a bladder." The implication of this may be regarded as an interiority where the speaker is in the process of thinking, thereby peeling back layer after layer of skin to get at the root of the matter. Within the white space that enlarges the scope of a poem is what's between the words. If language has any agency, Foust makes an unsettling contribution to our contemporary dystopia, only that in the end, it's more real than imagined.