Today’s featured author is Rebecca Faust of the book Dark Card. She is a parent of a teen with Asperger’s Syndrome and has done volunteer work in advocacy and grassroots political organization of parents of kids with learning challenges. Dark Card is a magnificent book of poetry, below is a poem and her explanation of the inspiration behind it. Even though my child has not been diagnosed with these learning challenges I can relate to her feelings with past experiences.
From Rebecca:
“Dark Card,” is about how I, for a long time, was unable to accept my son’s Asperger’s in its entirety; when people were perplexed or disturbed by his eccentricities, I’d divert their attention by focusing on the more socially acceptable aspect of his Asperger’s, this “savant” qualities. In this way I’d smooth things over without ever just coming out and saying, “He’s different and it’s ok to be different.” In fact I have come to appreciate that it is more than ok to be different, it is beautiful and can be celebrated. In many ways this describes the narrative arc of my book.
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DARK CARD by Rebecca Foust
When they look at my son like that
at the grocery store check out
or at school assemblies,
I wait for the right moment, till they move
through laughter, raised eyebrows, clamped lips
—but before fear. Then I switch gears,
go into my tap dance-and-shuffle routine.
Yes, he’s different, all kids are different, him
just a little bit more—oh, he’s knocked down
the applesauce pyramid? So sorry, here,
my sleeves conceal napkins for messes like this,
and I can make them disappear. But before I do,
make sure you marvel at how the jars
made an algorithm when he pulled that one free.
Oh, he was standing on his desk again, crowing
like a rooster in your third-period class?
Yes, bad manners, and worse luck
that he noticed how today’s date and the clock
matched the hour of what you taught
last week in a footnote—the exact pivotal
second of the Chinese Year of the Cock.
Before they get angry, I pull out my deck,
deal out what they want. Yes, he’s different,
but look at his IQ score, his Math SAT!
I’ve figured out that difference pays freight
when linked with intelligence; genius trumps odd,
alchemizes bizarre into merely eccentric.
So I play the dark card of the idiot savant,
trotting out parlor tricks in physics and math:
he sees solutions the way you might breathe!
Or perceive! The color green! It’s my ploy
to exorcise their pitchforks and torches,
to conjure Bill Gates when they see him,
or Einstein, not Kaczynski or Columbine;
perhaps they’ll think him delightfully odd
or oddly delightful, dark Anime eyes,
brow arc calligraphy on rice paper skin,
his question mark flowerstalk spine.
But it’s a swindle, a flimflam, a lie,
a not-celebration of what he sees
with his inward-turned eye:
the patterns in everything—traffic, dirt piles,
bare branches of trees, matrices in jar stacks,
Shang Dynasty history in tick of school clock,
music in color and math, the way shoppers
shuffle their feet while waiting on line;
how he tastes minute differences between brands—
even batches-within-brands—of pickles and cheese;
how he sees the moonlit vole
on the freeway’s blurred berm.
[This poem first appeared in Margie, Vol. 6, Fall 2007, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in December 2007.]
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“The Visitation,” another poem in her book Dark Card describes how Asperger’s can convey great gifts (savant abilities, photographic memory, etc.) but in the end these are not gifts that most parents or autistic kids would, if they had a choice, have chosen to “receive.”
You may purchase her book Dark Card
Click on this link to hear a recent radio show at kfog.com featuring Rebecca and other writers of kids with Asperger’s Syndrome and Austism Spectrum Disorder. (The link may take a few seconds to load, it is an mp3.) Or go to to www.kfog.com and click on community to find the “Beat of the Bay” on June 28, 2008.
More information about Rebecca Foust:
Foust lives in northern California with her husband and three teenagers, one of who has Autism. She began writing when she turned fifty, after a decade of volunteer work in advocacy and grassroots political organization of parents of kids with learning challenges and her book Dark Card, won the 2007 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook and was released by Texas Review Press in June 2008.
Dark Card is about parenting a son with Asperger’s Syndrome, the autistic spectrum disorder featured in the film “Rain Man” and in two recent bestsellers: Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robison and The Curious Incident with the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon.
Foust’s full length manuscript was a finalist in Poetry’s 2007 Emily Dickinson First Book Award, and her recent poetry won two 2007 Pushcart nominations and appears or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Margie, North American Review, Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, and others.
Her website is RebeccaFoust.com .
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