Only

By Rebecca Foust

Urgent from the outset, Rebecca Foust's Only insists that the only thing worth writing about is everything. Prompted to confront what she does not know, the speaker lists, "Null. All. What's after death or before." This book scales the cliff-face of adulthood, that paradoxical ascent in which the longer we live the less we know of life, in which we find that each of us is only ourselves and yet delicately interconnected with everyone, everything, else. These candid lyrics ponder our broken political systems, family (dys)function and parenting challenges, divergent and intersecting identities, the complexities of sexuality, natural refuge and climate catastrophe, and in general what it means to be human in a world that sometimes feels as if it is approaching apocalypse. At the ledge of this abyss, however, Foust reminds us of the staggering beauty of life, the legacies of survival in the echoes of care that outlast us: "I came / to the canyon rim and saw // how best to carry you: I let the stone go."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Four Way Books
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781954245365

Book preview

Prompt

Write only what you absolutely do not know, not what you’re merely not sure of.

STEPHEN DUNN

Null. All. What’s after death or before.

Where my old dog is now, my mother,

my father—not the ashes clumped

in a box, but the mad licking

and tail-beating and the gaze,

dense with devotion, of iris-less eyes.

My father’s delight in anything

wingless or red, why my mother left

that night, barefoot and worried

she’d miss it, the first landfall migration

of geese in raft after dark raft aloft

in a gray sky, an acre of feather and beak

that boiled and blotted the dark lake,

and no sound but the high cry.

Remember

Dream of the Rood

I wanted to be the girl with the small sharp shears who could balance

a child with a stone, who knelt in a glade

and laid sticks at right angles to build her own house where the violets,

her friends, had tender faces and leaves.

The mines were abandoned, silk mills closed, the railroad reduced

to one line, one long low wail at 2 am.

The town’s reason, gone. Stripper pit/strawberries/stripper pit/corn.

Coke-caked smokestacks, brick pink

in morning sun. Hollow train barns, canals silted in. Stores boarded up,

fan windows above still parsing