Reviews for A Mouth in California

The average rating for A Mouth in California based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-09-10 00:00:00 Gift Cardholder An extended review here would be de trop, because Ange Mlinko did such a stellar job in The Nation (as she always does). I thought, "Ooh ooh! I should point out the clever torque Foust gives to Pope's funny, insulting dog collar couplet at the end of his self-excoriating 'My Graham Foust,' but Ange had already been there. That's the strongest poem in here. Okay, even if that's a lie, it's the poem you'll most remember because of its musicality, its humor and its strong evocations of nearly forgotten poetic genres (the Vanitas, the mortal auto-ritrato). This is a dark collection of dubious scintillations. Its faces and voices are pulling themselves to pieces quite often. It's almost Halloween, and I'm wondering if Foust considered his release date for this grisly little beauty with the canniness Hollywood does. I'm thinking that's the case. Even though Brian Calvin's paintings which play with field/ground are good objective correlatives for Foust's poetics (which do the same), Francis Bacon is probably the portraitist Foust most closely resembles. This collection is more than a little bit a haunted house. Perhaps the collection suffers somewhat from having too many targets, and some of them recurrent targets. The sterility of the academic treadmill and its forced chants come under attack in poems like "Real Job" ("To make a darkness. // To then light up the fortunate dead.") and "Academy Fight Song" ("What I get's / a nick of space, these reams of paper.") And the spate of poems detailing the failure of writers and the failure of writing, or worse, the futility of writing, these black celebrations, begin to grate somewhat. The reader does encounter breakthrough moments, such as in "We Arrive as if at a Picture, Pinched," where the poem foregrounds a seminal paradox of artistic empathy: "And just now our son stands on a dead (I / think) baby bird, and he touches that / cracked ceramic rabbit as if it's alive." For me, that image sort of crystallizes the weirdness of Foust's aesthetic in this book. That image reads somewhat as a self-incriminating statement, and is possibly a self-critique the book is covertly making against the book. Can books secretly raise insurrections against themselves? Mr. Lincoln may have been wrong about a house divided. I mean when we are talking art and not politics. The poems are so often engaged in invective on art, that they sometimes lose the broader landscape of intuitive empathy. These poems prefer to implode. Not that I don't find poems that take off (baying like foxhounds) ekphrastically after say Bacon--or Goya's Capriccios--interesting or relevant--or poems that pattern themselves after Creeley's darker studies of human nature. Creeley was surely a major exemplar for this poet. But Creeley always balanced that darkness with an embrace of life and a generosity of spirit that turned the art back to the holy work of salvage--spiritual, intellectual and otherwise. While I enjoy the poet's almost gongoristic intricacy of wordplay and his fine ear, I find the blinkered tonality ultimately detracts. The poet is inventively dark. True that. And it's true that if one walked into a Bacon retrospective, one would not encounter a subset of cheerful or spiritually uplifting works. (Here I am tempted to quote the closing line from Foust's poem for Jack Spicer, because it actually aspires to Baconian slough: "I am trying to make my skin run.") Probably the title of the book is a funny aknowledgment, an admission that the poet is well aware of his collection's mouthiness. Several critics have appreciated the ramping up this collection presents, in terms of the finely-tooled prosody and stellar ear. Sometimes they have praised this work at the expense of the earlier, shorter poems which were the norm in the poet's previous books. I don't agree with those assessments. Empathy is much more closely allied with Negative Capability than the Atrabilious--even the witty atrabilious. It would be a Faustian shame if the poet ultimately decided to build an add-on bedroom for the Dark Muse that presided over this collection. Besides, he'd surely have to shop at an additional grocery store every time he went out on a run. Because I don't even want to imagine the sort of things such a Muse would have a hankering for. I mean always darkly pregnant. And all that.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-04-30 00:00:00 Frederic Dussault fucking wow