The Blog

From the outset of Graham Foust’s poetry career, his work has sought to answer the question posed in his first book, Leave the Room to Itself: “What is the poem.” Over the course of three intervening books, Foust has explored the function of language, attempting to map this faintly-Romantic notion of “the poem,” a slippery presence one finds embodied in consciousness. This consciousness—its origins, its signifiers, its longing for expression—has been explored by Foust largely within the constraints of his characteristic terse, lyric poem.

In Steve Tomasula’s geographically ambiguous locale called OZ, there are no yellow-brick roads, no munchkins, and no witches, wicked or otherwise. Perhaps more frightening than cackling hags, though, there are “connoisseurs” of elevator music. In OZ, Vanilla is called “Crema de Las Angelitas,” and all books are “devoted to the beauty of Auto.” The counterpart locale in this dystopian world is called IN, where just across the bridge myriad factories and plants plume up a thick haze of smog, where “carcinogenic” is among the most useful words, and where “The Tractor Trailer is King, and the Mobile Home Queen.” Tomasula presents twenty-seven brief scenes from this world with an alarmingly distinctive style that avoids many of the pitfalls of contemporary fiction which tend to invite the label “experimental” as a kind of bitter afterthought.