On the cool side of any dystopia lies its counterpart: the promise of utopia. And if utopia is a place of abundance, where everyone can have everything without suffering, then the question beating at the heart of any story set in a dystopia — a world where the needs of many go unmet and suffering is rampant — is this: what might a person be unwilling to give up? What is it we as humans cannot live without? You don’t have to be familiar with George Orwell’s 1984 to hear the riddle echo as metronome throughout Rebecca Foust’s You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems. That she qualifies the title as romantic sets the early foundation for its argument.
Foust is upfront about her aim and maintains her target to the end, where, in the notes at the back of the collection, she writes about “the idea of love as a subversive act,” and wonders whether “love is possible” in an Orwellian world. “Possible,” she posits, “and also profoundly necessary.” By that definition, this collection is itself an act of love — subversive and profoundly necessary. Much like water, which seeps its way into the collection even before it really begins, as a prologue. Or, maybe more accurately, we are introduced to a lack of water, immediately dropped into an existence rooted in deprivation.
In “Prologue: Water,” Foust writes, “There is no water in this world,” “I dream of rain,” and later, “In the sequel, I find you again / in a monsoon. Water so wide / it joins the sky like an ocean—remember / oceans?—an ocean inside.” In doing so, she sets up a tension between reality and imagination that will push and pull on the reader throughout the book, and she connects them both, deeply, to water. Water, which is essential to life, has the power to find its way into the smallest nooks and subvert our understanding of the material world, and, like love, is profoundly necessary.
In the distinction between reality and memory, Foust also draws out a dichotomy that duels throughout the work. We see the natural world, as a symbol of the human mind, flush with water when she writes, “I dream of ferns & bogs, trees / with wet feet, moss hummocked high / & starred with wild orchids,” up against a harsh reality of manmade constructions, undoubtedly a hot, dry hell of our own making — “It’s all / blasted asphalt & buildings worn / down to bone. All is arid.” The two wrestle across three sections, the first of which erodes our concept of truth.
The narrative opens in a familiar disaster (the pandemic, which Foust aptly titles “Plague”) and builds to increasingly egregious revisions of history, worsened with the help of our own complicitness. “Is truth then // just a construct that can be thrown away?” and “But, if a truth // only exists in memory, what happens // when we forget, or die?” she asks in “Where This is Leading” before presenting a legible erasure titled, “Rally Insurrection” as direct response.
Here, Foust strategically places the revisions in front of a struck-through phrase we can still see, for comparison. By choosing to place the edited text first, in an almost comedic Comic Sans-style font, primes us to take the added text as the first account, and the redacted text as an afterthought. It begs the question: how does the order in which something appears to us affect our understanding of what follows? How does a headline set us up to interpret the context of an article? Can we ever shake a first impression, even if it’s faulty?
The second section turns us toward a myopic look at the possibility of love in trying times. In “How it Begins,” Foust shares the origins of the love story between Winston and Julia. The poem lists the little gestures of picking posies and reading poems, attuning to her moods, showing fear, and letting go before circling back to the beginning. In closing, it reads, “He does these things / again & again, each time / as if for the first time, / without hope of return, / & that is how it begins.” The speaker emphasizes a persistence in this kind of love, a monotony to it, because that is how we survive hardship. We find small ways to mark the days, the passing of time, to show our love and humanity despite the overwhelming threat of death and destruction. And, in some ways, we become accustomed to it, begin to almost look forward to it. Didn’t we, during the heartbreak of the pandemic, when Foust reread 1984 as inspiration, take some pleasure in the quieting of our hurried normal?
The speaker eventually falls victim to the same fate in “Julia Looking Forward to the Hate,” where the speaker dreams of physical touch between her and her lover. The only space she can fathom the occurrence is “maybe at tonight’s / Hate,” which is enough to let her long for an event she initially despises. In this, Foust doesn’t ask us to do anything different than Orwell did. She doesn’t ask us, as readers or as humans, to do anything we don’t do every single day. She asks to hold two things at once: utter despair and consuming love, pain and joy, heartbreak and hope.
Much of this section continues in a dreamlike state: a dichotomy established between the harsh reality these characters find themselves in and the one flourishing in their imaginations. “Another Life,” “Sine & Blur,” and “Promise Me” all exist in an imagined future that may never arrive. Even in the closing poem of this section, “Last Night in the Room Above the Junk Shop,” the speaker ends with intimacy. She writes, “what she’ll remember later after the room is in splinters / after the stairs are torn down after they have renounced / each other in their separate cells ... ” is “his face looking down open & breathing & breathless / looking down at her real & here.”
With that, Foust plants a more subtle seed about the survival of humanity, because, more than the betrayal of the present, Julia counts what she remembers from the past as real. Despite their turning on one another, and sacrificing the love at the core of their humanity, the speaker focuses on the moment just before their capture. She stays in the scene in which they bear witness to one another, and she decides that this, our seeing each other, is what makes our existence real above all else.
While the first section constructed a foundation that leant itself to some hallucination on the part of the speakers, a middle section that floated above the chaos, the final third of the book gives the sense of collapse, if not defeat. Foust ushers us in, again, with water as the speaker in “Water, Reprise,” casts everything as water: “it’s all / made of water, even the water— // & the only thing real now is the past, insistent & infinite, / that I try to keep cupped—though I can’t quite hold / anything now—in my ruined hands.” If water, then, is everything — is truth, is reality, is memory — the speaker here is no longer capable of handling its fluidity.
What follows is an exploration of a path that often ferries love along: childbearing. We see a longing for children, a mandate to procreate, regulations on abortion, a PSA on consent — all of which allude to intimate, sexual acts, and some of which borrow not from 1984, but directly from much more recent headlines. In this way, Foust makes fluid the reality of the reader as well; which parts, we have to stop and wonder, are inspired by fiction again?
“Breaking News,” for example, duplicates news headlines and includes direct quotes, like “even before birth, all human beings bear the image / of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed / without effacing his glory—so much for separation / of church and state.” This borrowing, in some cases, can lead to a sense of prescriptiveness. But leaning prosaic in its efforts to call a spade a spade isn’t altogether a bad thing. It serves to reiterate what Foust shouts all along: look, see, witness the dystopia before our eyes.
“New Ars Poetica for 2024” marks a turn, a refusal, before the final three poems step back into a kind of cautionary tale. It begins, “This poem won’t sing on the sidewalk for dollar bills / or take penicillin; it’s disabled its airbags / and gone off the grid,” announcing, with certainty, a kind of defiance against authority, the stark denial of the aforementioned consent. And it feels, in some way, as though it says what the book as a whole wants you to hear: “This poem is not / your cure, sop, balm, or oasis of calm / in the world’s shitstorm.” No one is coming to save you, Foust cries to the reader.
We know now that You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems never meant to be our hero. It stands in front of a shitstorm screaming, and it can, at first, make a reader want to turn away. Despite its poetic integrity, the content itself — the magnifying glass it holds to the state of our world at the moment — can be tough to sit comfortably beside. It is, upon first read, upsetting. And that is exactly what makes it important. It never reneges on its promise to go down fighting, clawing at any scrap of hope.
Against this backdrop, the collection ends by setting course for a new reality, another version, a Promised Land, where “Here, the Worst Did Not Happen.” A here, which is not there, where the worst is happening. In this here, you must find your own hopes, your own dreams, to cling to. A here where, when it feels like there’s nothing we can do to stop the devastation, we can love. And we can, at the very least, look.
Annelise Schoups is a multinational poet who laughs at her own jokes and writes about things that are mostly not funny. Her work appears in the San Diego Poetry Annual, Silly Goose Press, and december. You can find her playing NYTGames with her partner, Justin, or on Instagram @anneliseschoups.