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colorado review 164 might, in another context, be too self-indulgent? What makes this book successful is its capability to look beyond the individual predicament to imagine a troubled world that includes the personal dilemma, the interior life, without reducing it as it travels within or alongside more macrocosmic events. I do not see a hierarchy of suffering in Pigafetta Is My Wife. Though the distance between two points is measurable, the difficulty of the psychic journey versus the physical one is not. A Mouth in California, by Graham Foust Flood Editions, 2009 reviewed by Joshua Baldwin Where to locate oneself, and how? And what happens upon death—disappearance, metamorphosis, or just a final everlasting loneliness? These are some of the questions that inform Graham Foust’s fourth collection, a short series of terse, focused poems (twenty-three out of fifty-seven of them have the word “poem” or “poetry” in their title), which generally seem to have been prompted by a severe head injury. Early on, there’s “Poem with Concussion”; then, a few pages later, the poet desiring painkillers refers to “Me / in a window, faint / of head and loud / of mind.” The drugs take hold, and it’s on to “Poem with Side Effect”; and several pages later he wonders if fatal damage has been done, yet stands bemusedly grateful to still be around, at least for now: “Given thinking’s / blown gland, another / breath was at least— / or was at best— / not nothing.” The poet’s mind has split into particles, the pieces have become abstracted from his body, and much of A Mouth in California feels like a selection of minimalist feedback emitting from Ginsberg’s pronouncement in “America” that “I can’t stand my own mind.” Yes, Foust seems to agree, the American mind is distraught, confused, and in anguish—but his head is all he has, and he’s got to find it, as he writes in “Real Job,” so at least he can “then groan a few where-was-I’s in a morning’s weird gold.” So, where was he, and where is he? The title would seem to give that away. He, or at least part of him (his mouth), is in California . Then again, it could be that everything but his mouth is in California. Oftentimes he’s somewhere in dreamland, be- 165 Book Notes tween wakefulness and sleep. He describes this place with terrifying clarity in “Morality and Temporal Sequence”: “And you fumble for the frames / in the rickety dark. You see clearly / for an hour, and then you dream. Come / dawn, you’re awake, make coffee. You burn / your lips on the first few sips, and then / you pour the rest away. You flip coins.” California, of course, is thought of as the dreamland—Hollywood, bounteous groves of fruit, everlasting sunshine. But (to complete the near-cliché of the Golden State) dreams are sometimes nightmares—full of earthquakes, serial murder, and bankruptcy. Like Foust’s coin, it’s a two-faced state. And one of the finest phrases in the book distills this oddly thrilling paradox of California. It comes in the poem “Los Angeles”: “The only critique / of paradise is paradise .” Under the influence of this Los Angeles phenomenon, of the city’s uncanny ability to cancel itself out, Foust feels at home in a fantastical nowhere where, merging onto a desolate linguistic freeway, “The movie turns / into itself.” But coalescence is only temporary. A sensation of self-estrangement runs through A Mouth in California, and so does a desire to get back in touch with oneself, to emerge from oblivion and experience the exciting sloppiness of youth, to be “Full of noise and lust.” Foust laments the stupor of adulthood and with a sharp, adventurous wit considers the meaning of death. He writes in “Mississippi Backwards”: “And when I’m dead I’m just / the dark’s prank. When I’m gone / I’ll be the song I wrote to get me back / to ash.” The surface darkness of these poems gives way to joyous, startlingly comical self-deprecation as Foust discovers “a boredom of cathedral proportion.” Foust is something like Wallace Stevens’s Snow...

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