Donald Justice Poetry Prize

John Foy

• Publisher: Autumn House Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781938769788
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

John Foy's newest collection is a tour de force of formal poetry, offering a blend of wit, cleverness, and deftness. Working in the lineage of poets like Billy Collins, Robert Frost, Frank O'Hara, W. H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop, Foy probes everyday experiences to generate compassionate, clever, and deeply knowing verse. While moments in No One Leaves the World Unhurt may appear absurd or even funny on the surface—such as a psychological exploration of the Lord of the Rings character Gollum—beneath this lightheartedness lies a tone that is grim and foreboding. Foy satirizes various elements of contemporary society, reflecting on war, wandering through the Museum of Sex in New York with his wife, and plucking apart idiomatic speech, which he breaks down, saying "It is what it is. / It's not what it might have been." Influenced by pop art and fine art and his New York home, which forms the backdrop of many of these poems, Foy's vibrant collection is simultaneously philosophical, whimsical, serious, and searching.
 

five

the television set

We hauled it out of a neighbor’s garbage pile

and carried off the booty to our fort,

Johnny Bowman and I, when we were boys.

Our fort was a refrigerator box

deep inside a wooded corner lot,

and this, our treasure, was a Magnavox.

We carried out a small experiment

and bashed the screen in with a baseball bat.

The glass erupted fundamentally.

Inside were gizmos wired to their boards,

the black, cylindrical capacitors,

resistors with their little colored bands,

so many that it took the breath away,

and wires that we gingerly picked apart.

Each component was invested with

the mystery of those things we didn’t know,

but each held out an incremental hope

that we might learn, one day, just what it was.

We divvied up the ripped-out circuit boards

and figured other boys would covet them.

We had an iron poker with a hook,

a diabolic thing that Johnny got,

and this we’d use upon our enemies

if they so much as came to look at us.

But the enemies that summer never came,

and so we had to make the best of it

alone in our refrigerator box,

guarding with a poker what we thought

was worth the time we spent protecting it.

long live rock

I lived for so long in that edifice,

that house of decline, where all my dreams

of rock stardom, never really mine,

existed like radioactive ghosts,

hyperexcitable and glamorous.

Electric guitars, I thought, would redeem

the dying I endured behind machines.

But that redemption never came to pass.

Instead, hysteria. The rock idols

fell foul of their dead counterparts, the ghouls

from that old film where failures walk the earth,

and there was disembowelment and betrayal

in the psychic house of the incredible.

My labor was no more than it was worth.

the bank

Before our livelihoods went down the drain,

Everyone said it’s all good and that,

At the end of the day, there is no end of the day.

Risk reigned. We were good to go.

So, going forward, how appalled we were

To see things going backward, downward badly

Every day, what we worked for dumped

As damaged goods for the greater good of all.

Ruin whispered in the very word

No one cared to look too closely at:

Subprime, bad, a bad end

Just waiting to occur. And when it came,

Pulling down a venerable house of cards,

Mostly jokers, we paid for what we were.

crane

Why exert myself without a cause?

I’d rather sit and watch the tower crane

outside my city window toward the bridge.

In summer smog that infiltrates the mind,

it’s like a ghost, attenuated, gray,

beyond its own particularity.

And later on, at night, it will become

the lonely, red-eyed sentinel I know,

keeping watch above the work it’s done,

the work that it will undertake again

when daytime gets to drinking over Queens.

But that is not the point. The tower crane

holds itself apart and does not need

to speak about the nature of its trust.

It makes a pick and puts a load in place

and stands, locked-in, without a narrative.

You too, my crane, will not exert yourself

without a cause, but when you work you move

with ministerial integrity

across the range of your appointed tasks,

a small portfolio of sky events

that you alone are fit to orchestrate.

Imprisoned in triangularities,

you demonstrate a way to rise above

the laws of gravity you work against,

all clearance and capacity and height.

You oversee a tower here, and there,

not asking what is guaranteed to last.

I’m given, now, to you. I only hope

that my line, too, pays cleanly off the sheave

without a hitch, at singular altitude,

the crane block running incorruptibly,

the reeving tight, the lifting taut and true.

blizzard

The blowing snow gives body

to psychotic shapes the wind assumes,

going sixteen ways at once

in a night that’s hard to get across.

A New York City bus is stuck,

a snowplow too. The subway’s down.

Most everyone is still in bed,

but I put on an overcoat

and go outside to get to work.

On Broadway I’m alone and walk

eleven blocks in the middle lane

at 4:00 a.m., the only place

that’s clear enough. The snow is piled

some four feet high and drift...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• one
• two
• three
• four
• five
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author