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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.6
EAN num: 9781933896144
ISBN number: 1933896140
Label: Texas Review Press
Manufacturer: Texas Review Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 36
Printing Date: November 30, 2008
Publishing house: Texas Review Press
Sale Popularity Level: 256957
Studio: Texas Review Press
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My labor heaves up in great waves like the moon-crazed tide; it raves like the tide-crazed moon, rising and rising too soon, too soon.
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Rated by buyers -
An award winning anthology of poetry, "Dark Card", is Rebecca Foust's reflections on dealing with her Asperger's Syndrome afflicted Autistic son. The poetry within explains why the chap book is award winning, and why the titular poem was nominated for 2007 Pushcart prize. "Dark Card" is an excellent collection, to be considered by poetry fans everywhere. "Underneath": His face is blank as a kettle pond/dawn, but he feels everything/there is underneath-- //tadpoles, minnows, sunfish, perch/fish-hooks, tangled lines,/frays of fat yarn algae strands,//filaments tethering lily stars/that from above seem free to skim,/milky writhe of swimmers' legs//mossed undersides of floats,/surprising truth of sailboat keels,/their iceberg depth.
Rated by buyers -
The twenty seven linked poems of Dark Card, winner of the 2007 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook award, turn on the poet's experience of raising her son, born with Asperger's syndrome. The narrative arc travels from grief and white-hot anger, to Foust's difficulty in accepting all aspects of her child's disability, opening finally onto transformative acceptance-- a state of grace, perhaps. The resonance of recurring themes and images help mould this collection into an almost novelistic whole.
Foust shows us her gifted, afflicted child as he is. We learn about the syndrome's manifestations, the child's neurological deficits, the wrong-headed practices of institutions responsible for him. When, in the title poem, the boy creates a scene at school, we are shown the coping mechanisms of his mother, as well: she plays the "dark card of the idiot savant ... /...It's my ploy to exorcise their pitchforks and torches/... But it's a swindle, a flimflam, a lie/ a not-celebration of what he sees/with his inward-turned eye:/the patterns in everything---"
The poet's emotions overflow the page. She rages against the possible sources of her son's syndrome. Like a tongue to a tooth, the author worries "...that Gordian- knot neck-throttled curse, /that gene-encrypted, linked-chain curse,//that DES-taken-by-his grandmother curse,/that fumble-fingered-fool-doctor-shaped curse..." . She spits out her indictments in diatribes worthy of the name. Her anger hits its target in "Palace Eunuch":
Don't say you were trying to be kind,
you ball-less prick soft dick eunuch
cowardly coin-counting conservator.
You were practically pissing yourself
in your fear of malpractice,
you were shaking in your purple paper booties.
These poems show the many ways in which the quality of life argument is entirely subjective. We see how the boy's behaviors set him apart and make him singular, but we get a rounder view here than in disability poetry purely from the patient's POV (The Hospital Poems by Jim Ferris comes to mind). In one of the best poems, "Asperger Ecstasy," Foust observes the activities that make her son "vibrate with joy." "It can be tying flies under a microscope, knot patterns / the size of this period. It can be cataloging washing / machine brands or the note variations in a symphony, / or committing to memory for joyous recounting / the entire year's schedule for the El-train." As she makes peace with his differences, she begins to celebrate them: "He makes/ meaning from acorns,/ the sky,/knotted bits/ of string." (The Visitation) We watch her empathy swell. She makes us believe her when she says that her son "loves who he is."
Foust's use of poetic devices is as expert as her emotional spectrum is varied. Her line breaks reveal meaning in fresh ways, and her use of sound is a mark of her craft---the sustained vowels throughout "Instrument," the single word lines in the final strophe of "Firstborn," echoing the child's very first thin breath; the compound words that heighten the passion in her teeth-gnashing rants. There are allusions to Emily Dickinson's feathered hope and Temple Grandin's empathy, and Foust raises the hair on the reader's arm when she says about her baby, "You freeze my heart to stone/when I measure your foot with my thumb."(No Longer Medusa).
The author reconciles the grim with the hopeful in Dark Card, and her voice never wavers in its fierce emotional honesty. And when, in the extraordinary final poem, the recurring image of her son's Gordian knot "unravels with his years, unwinds, unfolds,/lets loop out in vast uncoiling spirals/whole archives of text,/found worlds," we are moved. The poet has succeeded in making the personal universal. We close the covers, uplifted by Rebecca Foust's courage and her compassionate song.
Rated by buyers 
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I read Dark Card on my vacation. I reacted most deeply to Perfect Target, Sweet Heart, Begin Again - all three made me pause and just feel sick about how cruel people can be to each other and the impacts of seemingly small events on a precious life. It makes me wonder how easily we as individuals and a culture are afraid of vulnerability and the need for eliminating the weak to make ourselves feel strong rather than embracing them. These three poems are marked with tears. There were a few others that really hit me in the gut for how much the emotional content of the poem became my own: Apologies to My OB-GYN, No Longer Medusa, Unreachable Child, He Never Lies, Eighteen (he made it!), Refrigorator Mom. These poems are marked with a check to reread. Thank you for sharing yourself and your son's journey through poetry.
Rated by buyers -
Life as art ... there is a special gift in the ability to share one's life as art, to issue a challenge to each beholder, to trigger a deeper reaching within and without, to one's coming away changed. The amazingly insightful cover and the signpost of a title dare us to pass through this doorway, to accept the challenge to go beyond and experience what these travelers before us offer to share. Will any two come away with the same experience? I don't think so. For me this journey was worth the beauty, love, and mystery revealed along side the pain of Dark Card. Without the presence of light, we would not even see this silhouette. I am thankful that there are artists and poets who can transcend the dark to share their lives by shining light.
Rated by buyers -
In Dark Card, Rebecca Foust gives the reader a lesson in courage -- the courage of a mother raising a child with a disability, the courage to face the reality this forces upon her, the courage to probe the feelings deep within, and the courage to put those feelings into unforgettable words. This is the open heart of a mother, with all the pain and joy exposed. Read it with respect. It will move you.
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