Time Down to Mind

by Graham Foust

Poetry. "No one gets dark (or gets darkness) like Graham Foust. He's the one who'll 'A touch horrific is the green with which / the ground will tear the winter' while everyone else is writing their paean to spring. His (and ours) is a world of violence and ennui set to catchy numbers. 'I heard a fly buzz. / I don't know when I died.' In TIME DOWN TO MIND, Foust, now in early middle age, feels time's pressure as never before. He faces backwards tweaking lines from old songs and poems while being pulled or blown into the future. 'The heart of being is that I'm being forced out.' This is something we all know, of course, but who else will put it so baldly, so memorably. This work feels necessary."—Rae Armantrout

"I like when it feels like poems are 'written for me.' Graham Foust's poems have that the way they sound, the connections they make—to each other, to life, our lives... Just open this book and I'm sure you'll agree!"—Stephen Malkmus

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published December 7, 2015

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Time Down To Mind offers up its share of bourgeois bathos and self-deprecating humor, but it's also got Foust's best writing yet, a clearer measure of sublime self-absorption than many another commuter down the pastoral lane of American verse. Don't expect self-abnegating hymns to BLM. It's apophansis all the slippery slope down. "Freedom from want?" Foust asks in the magisterial "Poem For A While," "Want is all I've almost owned. | I want least want's failure to be words with me. | Mornings I wake to remembering children | and then waiting for the children themselves." Aphoristic tussles with mock-aphoristic in a bar fight over who gets to offer the voice a drink.