How To Live Authentically: On John Foy's "No One Leaves The World Unhurt"
John Foy | No One Leaves The World Unhurt | Autumn House Press | 2021 | 85 Pages
John Foy’s third book of poems, No One Leaves the World Unhurt, begins with a poem called “The Payment Plan,” which informs the reader, “you, too, will be officially enrolled… the plan is quite unique in that you pay in the universal currency of pain.” But, the speaker assures us, we needn’t enroll in the most severe plan, the “Harvard plan,” because “we understand you have a narrative that helps impart some meaning to your life.” So, there is a saving grace: there is no getting out of pain, but perhaps our stories will help us to bear it. A constant awareness of pain, of its presence, of its possibility, is the thread that weaves together this collection of poems. These poems speak of death, of illness, of the horror of war, of faith, of birdsong, of love. And, too, there are poems concerned with the decapitation of Barbies, boyhood forts, and rock and roll. Taken individually, the poems vary greatly in form, tone, and topic. Taken together, they weave an image of life itself. Turning from one page to the next, a reader may laugh, then cringe, then cry. Just as one might throughout the course of a given day.
Foy takes evident joy in toying with language and form. One of the most playful poems of the book, “It Is What It Is,” twists and expands this trite phrase in myriad ways, peaking with the line “it ought never to have been what it had been.” In another poem, the speaker plays with self-help titles, riffing on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and becoming increasingly unhinged as the poem goes on. One of these faux-titles is “how to live authentically in Cleveland.” Though clearly a joke, another random-ish title in a long list of them, this seems a fitting description of the ethos of the book itself: an effort at living authentically, at acknowledging that life is hard, but that there’s also The Lord of the Rings to watch and sex museums to visit. Foy’s own account of his visit to New York’s Museum of Sex takes the form of fourteen sonnets on the place.
The playful poems of No One Leaves the World Unhurt are often followed by tense ones, such as “Blizzard,” where the snow “gives body to psychotic shapes the wind assumes,” and where in fear, perhaps of these psychotic shapes, the speaker carries a blackjack for protection. He boards a cab and wonders if the driver “maybe has a gun somewhere.” The poem brings Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods” to mind with its closing “we both have promises to keep,” though this speaker’s tone is not one of awe at the beauty of snow but one of anxiety, of distrust for his fellow man. Still, the speaker turns to that famous line, trying to salvage the fear-ridden experience, to make it beautiful by mapping it onto another known narrative. We see similar phenomena in a series of bleak poems depicting the experiences of soldiers at war, full of “the stinking heat from gasoline fires” and “the shriek and crack of all types of rockets,” “rounds coming in all around you, everywhere.” The soldiers turn to narratives of their own to understand these realities: they cry out “O Holy Mother of God,” they compare the sounds of war to a “daughter’s voice,” they understand that they must throw their concussion grenades “like Carlos Carela did that summer when he nailed a runner at the plate.”
In one of the book’s finest poems, “Cross and Sphere,” we find “Jesus on the East side, crucified, and Atlas on the West side, leaning in.” We’re in Manhattan, where, when the doors to St. Patrick’s are open, one can see Jesus on the cross and Atlas in Rockefeller center. From this striking set of images flow impactful details, such as the description of Atlas “shouldering the heavens like a man with a second mortgage and child support to pay.” Throughout the book, we find frequent examples of this juxtaposition of the old with the new: the titans with the mortgage crisis, Latin with Barbie dolls, always to profound effect.
Foy writes about this world, this moment we’re living in, but with a firm footing in the past and a powerful command of traditional forms which he bends and remakes to his own uses. No One Leaves The World Unhurt offers an open-eyed view of life, of what it is, of what it can be, of how it will end: “an act of God that leaves me in the cold.” Until that act, though, there is life, and there is the drive to share with others. In the closing poem, the speaker is thinking of giving up poetry, “but then I took a sip of rye and thought of all my demons nightly coming round to sit with me because I’m here, alive, with so much unresolved. It’s what I’ve bought and sold they ask of me. It is the sound they make that I must render to survive.”