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Rebecca Foust,
Backbone Press, 2024
47 pages
Review by Rick Mullin
Rebecca Foust’s new chapbook of poems has a strange prescience. Conceived during her re-reading of George Orwell’s 1984 during the pandemic, it frames the first Trump administration in the context of that novel’s mass manipulation via thought control, Newspeak, and assigned hatreds for the purpose of enforced obeisance to Big Brother. Arriving just prior to Trump’s election to a non-consecutive second term, You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems also writes history forward.
Foust is certainly not alone in connecting the Trump years, 2016 - 2020, to Orwell’s dystopia. The connection is obvious. Slightly more hyperbolic at the time were the many comparisons of Trump to Hitler. The latter, after Trump’s first few weeks back in office, are a little more compelling, given the establishment of camps for deportees, the president’s Anschluss dreams regarding Canada, and the growing popularity of the Nazi salute. Meanwhile the upside-down world of 1984 is perfectly replicated in the administration’s assertion that president Volodymir Zelensky of Ukraine is a dictator and that Ukraine started the war with Russia.
But Foust is not belaboring easy comparisons. Poems in the collection, which takes its name from the sign at Checkpoint Charlie in West Berlin during the Cold War, hold an authoritarian regime’s feet to the fire on its many lies and violations of democracy and human decency, casting a keen eye on how language and silence have been tortured such that an obvious con man is viewed by over half the electorate (this time) as the savior of a great nation. It’s a sharply pointed, whole-hearted J’Accuse put forward in the truthful and persuasive language of poetry.
Like 1984, You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems is also a love story and the saga of an individual trying to fashion a future from the demolition of the past. The first poem, “Prologue: Water” introduces us to a world in which there is no more water other than what exists in “State cisterns”. The landscape is concrete and ruins, and its inhabitants, under the eye of Big Brother, suffer amidst the devastation and loss:
We used
to have inner rooms to retreat to,
but now every wall is a screen
with a lens looking in.
The narrator’s hopes are expressed in a dream of rain, of roads going anywhere there are mountains and springs. In a sequel to the dream, she is reunited in a monsoon with a lover whose mutual betrayal immediately precedes the vanishing of water. The monsoon evokes a longing for interior space, an ocean inside.
The narrator, an alter ego of the character Julia in 1984, refers to the fluidity and absence of nature throughout the collection. In “Plague”, a poem set during Covid lockdown, she is overwhelmed by birds arriving at a newly-hung bird feeder. The onslaught has her feeling infinitesimally small, one cell in a body / one word in the Iliad. And it reminds her of the frightful death toll in the early months of the pandemic, a nightly knell of names/ read aloud, whereupon she conjures the memorable line in “Burial of the Dead”, the first section of Eliot’s “The Waste Land”: I had not thought death had undone so many.
In the first section of her book, “World State of Ford 632 / USA-2016-24”, Foust lays out the tenants of contemporary Newspeak. The poem “Where This is Leading” begins with an epigraph from Orwell’s novel: Who controls the past… controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. It describes the pride Julia’s soon-to-be lover Winston Smith takes in revising history at the Ministry of Truth, as well as the mechanism of the Big and Small Lie:
…when our leader
tells obvious lies, even small ones,
it teaches us to mistrust our own senses & frays
the fabric of our shared reality—
The following poem, “Rally Insurrection” playfully illustrates the machinations of the Ministry of Truth (renamed, according to a headnote, Truth Social, the social media site Donald Trump launched after he was bounced from Twitter). The poem is an edited news brief reporting on the January 26, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
They peacefully assembled at stormed the Capitol Building,
carrying cell phones and water bottles guns, pipe bombs, Molotov
cocktails, knives, axes, lead pipes, bats, chemical sprays,
zip ties, and rope used to erect a gallows.
The crossed-out arsenal here is an echo of the litany in Bob Dylan’s song “Jokerman”, one that prefigures our contemporary landscape with
Nightsticks and water cannons, tear gas, padlocks
Molotov cocktails and rocks behind every curtain
Poems that follow show how subtle adjustments to diction and line breaks strategically distort meaning, and how silence born of confusion comes in response to something as insidious as the January 6 insurrection.
Section two of the collection, “Julia & Winston”, shifts focus to the lovers’ subversive relationship, describing a small private world of resistance. Much of it is told from Julia’s perspective, beginning in “How it Begins” with the artificial nature in Winston’s initial overture.
He picks posies for her
on his portable telescreen,
with captions like
lovelies for the lovely.
Winston eventually turns to poetry, repeatedly reading poems to Julia until he can recite them “verbatim”. In “Another Life” Julia’s dream world becomes more active in its retreat from the concrete and confusion all around her.
In another life, I am home
to plant & weed & pick, my fruit
does not rot on the tree…
… I swim & swim & swim…
In (the dream), I am not ashamed
Nature imagery flourishes as Julia’s imagination becomes her reality, one defined by visions such as the rectangular patterns of light in a hideaway room with the white rhomboids of moon / thrown on the bare floorboards in “Promise Me”. Foust’s voicing of Julia’s dream memories of a time prior to going into hiding in “Shine & Blur” cleaves to her prologue’s conceit. It is also gorgeous poetry:
In my dream, I do not shy
away when you lean in…
… I remember kissing you before—
in the hedgerow, on the shore, on the threshold
of a door opening to everything—break & release
released in a river, then all blur & shine, shine & blur.
The concrete world comes crashing back in section three, “Leaving the American Sector” with the demise of the lovers’ escape. Here Foust’s anger is raw and unmitigated, especially in a suite of poems dealing with sexual violation of women and restriction to access to abortion. Foust innumerates familiar threats to women’s agency and health, some torn from the headlines, closing with sardonic humor in the third of the three poems, a Dick and Jane primer headed with a epigraph quote from President Trump: “It’s a very scary time for young men in America”
The section closes with one more litany in “Here the Worst Did Not Happen”, a poem confronting an electorate that puts corrupt politicians into office, one that lives in relative comfort compared to the devastation of populations in Ukraine and Gaza, comfort that may well be clocking out given the permanent presence of Big Brother; a entity identified by Orwell in 1949 that will not culminate with Donald Trump, who has always been a garish symptom of something structurally wrong, something truly evil in America.
There are stretches where the narration and imparting of information seem to edge out “poetry,” but these are few. In fact, the wonder of You Are Leaving the American Sector; Love Poems is the integrity of poetry conveying complex narrative, lists, and streams of information across three chapters of verse. My margin notes include more than one scribbled “beautiful”.
Scaffolded by Orwell’s novel, Foust’s collection remains focused on our times, on what we’ve seen, what we see, and what we will see in America with the surge toward a Trump oligarchy. The story is its own, managing to rise as personal testimony amidst the familiar crisis. One would not need to re-read 1984 to fully engage with Foust’s urgent reckoning.
