Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. A MOUTH IN CALIFORNIA, Graham Foust's fourth book of poetry, uses the ironies and anxieties of contemporary life as a foil for mordant and sometimes violent humor. Through mangled aphorisms, misheard song lyrics, and off-key phrasing, Foust creates a unique idiom of tragicomic pratfalls, a ballet of falling down. Yet the elasticity of Foust's language repels the stiff-necked adversaries of thought: "what's the wrong way to break / that brick of truth back into music?"
Review
"Into the lacunae rush approximations, summaries, tatters of popular song, gluey rhymes, ill-fitting aphorisms, and often the relaxed rhetorical annotations of a speaker perfectly comfortable making editorial comments on his own perpetually collapsing project." The Constant Critic
Review
"Foust's undertaking collages a fashionable 21st-century Surrealism with a perennially anarchic Dadaism, exploring an enhanced sense of the emotional self as well as his political stand in the world." Sean Patrick Hill, Rain Taxi (Read the entire )
Synopsis
A Mouth in California, Graham Foust's fourth book of poetry, uses the ironies and anxieties of contemporary life as a foil for mordant and sometimes violent humor. Through mangled aphorisms, misheard song lyrics, and off-key phrasing, Foust creates a unique idiom of tragicomic pratfalls, a ballet of falling down. Yet the elasticity of Foust's language repels the stiff-necked adversaries of thought: what's the wrong way to break / that brick of truth back into music?
About the Author
Graham Foust was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The author of four books of poetry, including Necessary Stranger (Flood Editions, 2007), he lives in Oakland, California, with his wife and son and teaches at Saint Mary's College of California.