Graham Foust - Necessary Stranger

Graham Foust – Necessary Stranger

Graham Foust is interesting me quite a bit these days. In Necessary Stranger he’s enacting time as much from the interior of the voice of the poem as in what the voice is engaging. It’s rather elemental in this way. Or fundamental. How his poems almost evaporate into the voice. Quite a bit differently than Sarah Vap, who’s also interesting me these days. Her poems seem to nearly evaporate into the world. But that’s for another day.

As well, and just to clinch the deal, he mentions Neil Young in a poem . . . Here are a couple (non-Neil Young) poems from Necessary Stranger:


Balmoral


Things’ll get
all right,

the infield strangely green.

I can’t tell you
who’ll win,

who’ll suffer,

how old
I wish I were.

It’s always this—

just shoved into something
I never could have made.


Number One Hit Song


The above is leaf-math,
a high
block of cottonwood.

I am for volume.
I am for tubes in and out of the sick.

If heaven were only
where only
you could hurt you,

I would touch its dead and broadcast
their entire range of breakage.

I would breathe to within
a skin’s-width
of my sleep.

I would make a little nimbus there,
a clear heart for moths to toss against.

Late and unancient, inexact
as hands, I would move
as if by choice into my life.