Excerpt
As the selection advances through Dark Eros and Dark Story, the images grow more bodily and volatile. “Night Trip” turns a bus ride into a passage through cosmic time: the vehicle grinds “the seconds into airy flour,” while the speaker runs toward the future in “dizzy motionlessness.” That compact contradiction captures Fostieris’s method. Motion and stasis, flesh and abstraction, faith and skepticism keep occupying the same sentence. In “Silence,” the word is addressed as a presence beside a coffin, and the poem hears “the rattling of the machine guns” beneath the stars’ secret sounds. The lyric’s private scene opens onto historical violence without settling into a documentary account. Elsewhere in Dark Eros, desire is both comic and metaphysical: “Eros” calls it “pink pulp” in schools and discos, then “unforgettable cotton candy,” sticky sweetness that joins bodily appetite to the wish for beauty. The dark register does not cancel sensuality; it makes pleasure provisional.
The middle collections deepen Fostieris’s interest in moral reversals and unstable identities. The Devil Sang Well gives the devil and angel paired monologues, each discovering beauty in the other’s rejected nature. Their exchange unsettles the easy moral division implied by their names. “Satan has no Gender” makes that instability erotic and theatrical: Satan borrows bodies, colors, and emotions, while promising, “There are thousands of paths, / choose one.” The speaker suspects every route returns to the same encounter. In The Shall and the Should of Death, mortality becomes less a distant event than the hidden accounting of ordinary life. “Immortality of the Day” follows an ant carrying seeds toward a winter that, by the end, “isn’t coming anymore”; the long, recursive sentence makes routine feel both absurd and fragile. In the title poem, a dying person’s remembered “insignificant images” become a debt that cannot be repaid. Death measures life not by grand achievement but by the small experiences we hoard and cannot keep.
