Review by Lo Galluccio
DARK CARD
By Rebecca Foust
Texas Review Press
English Department
Sam Houston State University
Huntsville, TX, 77341-2146
ISBN# 13: 978-1-933896-14-4
2008, 36 pp., $8.95
www.tamu.edu/upress/
In Rebecca Foust’s first full-length poetry book, Dark Card, she creates a prism of experience, imagery and episode through which to describe and honor her relationship to her son’s struggle with Asperger’s Syndrome. The poems span in time from his bloody (almost mishap) of birth, to schooling traumas, to his rather triumphal eighteenth year when he has finally taken rational charge of things which enable him to function with others smoothly in the world. Far from a mere object lesson, Rebecca’s son is like a strange, wondrous and unruly kite that she must learn to anchor and let fly with the winds of existence. The book is also a reflection of her own transformation as her sense of her son deepens and their bond matures.
In a poem called, “No Longer Medusa,” she states:
When I had you I gave birth
to my mirror
the chink in my armor.
