You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems takes a familiar approach to past and present political horrors and turns it on its head. Rebecca Foust reads 1984 as a primer for our time, and many poems refer directly to Orwell’s novel (for those hazy on the book’s details, Foust provides a synopsis in her notes). If the parallels between Big Brother and our homegrown version have been noted before, Foust explores what many commentators ignore –– that 1984 is a love story. Winston and Julia’s passion is central to the plot, and it’s love that throws a wrench, however briefly, into the gears of the State. For Foust, this includes love for an imperiled natural world, compassion for the those lost during the pandemic, and devotion to precise, evocative language authoritarians labor to undo.
Foust frames her collection with “Prologue: Water,” which is in fact a retrospective: “After we betrayed one another / & our story ended, the water began / to subside.” Except for “what is stored / in the State cisterns,” one of life’s essentials has vanished. Tiger lilies that “blaze in ditches edging a road,” bogs with “moss hummocked high / & starred with wild orchids” exist only in dreams; “Lakes & streams / shrunk & stank then disappeared / except on maps, then the maps / disappeared.” Foust pairs the desiccation of the natural world with the withering of memory written in old maps, both instigated by humans in power. Visions of bogs, streams, and lakes broaden to include the sea, as the speaker imagines, “In the sequel, I find you again / in a monsoon. Water so wide / it joins sky like an ocean,” as love –– equally essential to human life –– translates to “an ocean inside.”
Foust cannily weaves poems featuring Orwell’s characters with poems highlighting incidents from the dread years 2016-2020. In “Plague,” she does both: the speaker thinks of Julia, who had forgotten “there were birds in the world,” while filling a feeder and watching wings arrive “like leaves in wind so many I felt subsumed / made small one cell in a body // one word in the Iliad one bit in an infinite string/of code …” Foust employs emblems of nature, the body, art, and tech to sound the overwhelming tide of Covid deaths that “blurred in sine curves;” as “the nightly knell of names” were “read aloud,” she writes, “I could not fathom those numbers.”
You Are Leaving The American Sector is formally adventurous. Foust will stud a prose poem with multiple spaces between phrases, creating something akin to line breaks; her strikeout erasures and handwritten amendments exemplify doublespeak, as in this excerpt from “RALLY Insurrection”:
On January 6, 2020, a crowd mob came to Washington to fight
for their country disrupt the peaceful transfer of power
while Congress was formalizing Biden’s election steal win.
In the octave of the unpunctuated sonnet “Promise Me,” Julia imagines “when I’ve unhooked from time / & death & love finally rhyme,” her lover Winston will still “… burn / somehow somewhere with the same / when why not here why not now.” The sestet offers another possibility: a “blooming child” who brings “a blade of grass to her lips / to blow the shape of my name / into the wild broad bleed of a vowel.” Foust rides the balance between time’s black hole and the promise of generation with the sound of Julia’s name: it’s made by grass –– perhaps Whitman’s “beautiful uncut hair of graves”? –– and vibrates no sweet note but a “wild broad bleed.” In Foust’s poem, burning and bleeding perfect the rhyme of love and death.
Foust’s precise language is the ultimate rebuke to forces seeking to erase “our shared & stored history” (“Where This Is Leading”), and she’s frank in expressing the limits of what an individual can do against state-sponsored confusion. In “The Silence,” an artist’s work dissolves in a way that’s musical and visceral: truth becomes “a watercolor/left out in the rain / weeping its meaning away” as the long vowels of “rain” and “away” echo the sound of tears. In “How It Begins,” love is as vulnerable as “… an egg / in the velvety mouth / & irrefutable jaw / of a good bird dog.” The balance of “egg” / “mouth,” “velvety” / “irrefutable” and the knowledge that not all bird dogs are “good,” underscores the fragility of the world Foust’s lovers –– and we –– live in.