Graham Foust's Poetry

A blast from the past. Well 2003, anyway. From Graham Foust’s Leave the Room to Itself. Foust has gotten a lot of notice over the past few years. When Necessary Stranger came out, it seems to me it was the book that everyone was suggesting to everyone. In his best poems, as in the poem below, he’s able to achieve a richness, a resonance, with fairly declarative, flat language. The narrowness of the line and tone is widened by the leaps of logic and association.


Graham Foust
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 the itself.
Here’s a needle. Here is the sea.