Off the Beach

Graham Foust

Stuff is time, time stuff, the feelgood ruthless:Thirty shells that want nothing to do with one another,the person I wanted to love moving into the dark.Stuff is time, time stuff, the feelgood ruthless:"Put back, you're where you would've been besthad you not had to be," but the chorus forgets(or rather, as it's dead now, it forgot) the sweet spotnot long after nascence, but well before any obligation.Stuff is time, time stuff, the feelgood ruthless:None of me are ever alone, I'll give us that(not to mention that the bulk of us are ugly)but I'm the only one whoever's up here is—blunt quiet; left, right; not not peculiar—and I no more wake to forget than live to heal.

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Graham Foust is the author of nine books of poems. With Samuel Frederick, he has co-translated four books by the late German poet Ernst Meister. Raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, he lives in Denver, Colorado.

Cover of Terminations

Chicago, Illinois

“Reading Terminations is like watching a make-up tutorial in reverse—which is to say, the deconstruction of an art that, on its face, is applied to conceal and therefore beautify what is inherently colored by the decay it daily wears. So it shocks us to see something so seemingly done-up come undone and more shocking (and uncanny and satisfying) still to realize ah, that’s what it looks like under all that bake and contour. How odd. You realize, after you’ve been terminated two or three times by Graham, that there’s no hiding from this, the naked face of language, the dull and perfect void we all inhabit and never, fortunately or unfortunately, will find ourselves grayed-out by. The point is, nevertheless, not ‘to be a goddamned monster,’ about what you see (and deftly don’t) when the makeup comes off and the words bend in heat and light, if you can help it. So help you God.”
—Andrew E. Colarusso

“Like Stevens, Foust writes intricate poems that explore a world from which meaning has departed; the poet seeks to restore it, however tentatively, through the powers of artifice.”
—Ben Lerner, Harper’s Magazine

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