Rebecca Foust’s most recent collection of poems, The Unexploded Ordnance Bin, which won the 2018 Swan Scythe Press chapbook award, goes beyond just a compilation of great poems: it is a tightly woven ensemble eagerly waiting for readers to unveil its meanings. Split into three sections of different lengths, the book delves into challenging life journeys: the primary (and longest) focusing on the poet’s autistic son, the second on suffering children worldwide, and the third on her transgender daughter’s transition. Like the son in the opening poem, “Only,” who speaks from the heart, the single speaker/mother in the collection does the same without succumbing to self-pity or sentimentality. She plays the role of an observer, witnessing others navigate their struggles, all the while trying to maintain a home for them, a home unable to shield them from the hardships they will encounter.
The initial poem, one of the five sonnets in the chapbook, presents contrasts within its stanzas. In one instance, the speaker’s son is born. Progressing to the following stanza, the son’s head is removed: “my son was born. The cord was torn / too soon, so they cut off // his head to save his heart … .” These stark oppositions illuminate a world where life and death interchange. Even though the poem mentions that “He lived for a long time,” by the end, the speaker mentions twice: “Some say he died.” The poem reveals a significant contrast between the “green” walls of the birthing room, where humans disassemble her son, and the beautiful natural world that he later inhabits. Throughout Section I, the son finds solace in this natural world and in technology, showcasing moments like “He collects horseshoe-crab trash / knowing and naming each slender spire,” and “Shared obsession and fixed gaze, six of them / brood over three rebuilt monitors.”
Section II commences at the speaker’s home, expanding from the son’s suffering to global suffering. There’s Miguel, whose mother lacks proper documentation. Similar to the son in “Only,” Miguel also sings: “dog sounds, / hello sounds, good-bye sounds,” full of “round, hollow vowels.” The speaker broadens her perspective from Miguel in the US to Dachau, juxtaposing a neat village close to the camp “about as close to the camp / as the ICE Deportation Center in the town / next to mine,” underscoring our collective responsibility in the historical cruelties of humanity. In “Remembrance of Things Past,” the focus shifts to the repeal of the Dream Act and the tragic 2001 deaths of fourteen immigrants near Yuma, Arizona. The poem evokes a musical refrain: “A lullaby of cries / and soft curses.” In the subsequent villanelle, “Requiem Mass for the Yuma Fourteen,” the immigrants are remembered with a poignant repetitive stanza: “The desert composes its requiem.” The section culminates with “Flame,” honoring a female Palestinian suicide bomber. The poem closes in silence, contrasting the earlier musicality with “and silence, in one thin flame / rising.”
The final section commences in the natural realm, depicting a dolphin mother with a calf by her side, reminiscent of the speaker’s children.
[ … ]somewhere
in time you and I
moved like that what matter that
you my sonthen
now my daughter
These lines herald the theme of Section III: the speaker’s exploration of her child’s gender transition.
In “Free,” the speaker reflects on the initial separation from her child when the umbilical cord is cut, hoping her child will be “restored,” not as the slumbering child but as “the child who / woke & was finally able to be.” The poem concludes with a poignant rhyme echoing its title, symbolizing the cycle of life coming full circle. Conversely, “Prodigal” injects irony into the child’s potential return. The poem juxtaposes the mother’s childbirth loss with her enduring faith in miracles and playfully presents improbable miracles like
Medea’s kids sung to and snug in their bed,
truth in the news, the world intact in a bead
of dew, and—bound fast to me—you.
The Unexploded Ordnance Bin wraps up with “Second Gratitude,” a distinctive return. In “Autism,” the second poem, the mother navigates an uncertain future alone without knowing how to protect her son. Now, in the closing poem, she and the children’s father have “figured out Pandora,” the music streaming platform, rediscovering their “old music.” While unable to shield her children, she understands her daughter’s emotions, celebrating this certainty by repeating “know” five times in the poem. “I know I’ll call and you won’t answer / and still I’ll call,” she acknowledges. Much like the hospital walls in the initial poem, the speaker’s heart is now “green.” The collection ends powerfully with her declaration, “and I remember all the words”—not just the lyrics of a Pandora song, but the language to articulate these poems, vocal tunes conveying the profound suffering and love woven into her life.
