A memoir in poems, Mary Warren Foulk’s The Show Must Go On centers on the topics of sibling loss and queer identity, including queer parenting. It pays tribute to the author’s older brother, Stephen, who died quite tragically at age forty. He was gay, though he remained closeted. In these poems, Foulk navigates his loss and legacy, along with other losses; she attempts to continue their intimate dialogue and connection (an exploration of gay sibling language); and she celebrates his influence and lessons through her own coming out process, and through the redemption and love (queer joy!) she has found in her wife, their children, the community they have created. Several poems address Foulk’s pathway(s) to parenthood, including familial/societal reactions, those affirming, those discriminatory, the range and over time.
She explores what it means to be a motherless mother, how a family can celebrate the empty seats at the table, the traditions inherited.
The “ending” Mary Foulk would wish for the “you,” a beloved brother who died before he could embrace his life as a gay man, is the life she chronicles in this collection, addressing the loss of both parents as well as her brother while also exploring the nature of grief itself. She also chronicles the evolution of her own sexuality from the confusions of adolescence to coming out to marriage and parenthood with a beloved wife, but these poems do more than address essential themes; they soar off the page in a variety of forms-haiku, prose, erasure, anaphora-savoring language itself, poetry as song, in addition to honoring the challenges they address so articulately.
Leslie Ullman, author of Little Soul and the Selves and Library of Small Happiness, https://www.leslieullman.com/
The Show Must Go On is such a tender patchwork of sites. Sites of the queer horizons of sheets and midnight’s kneeling. Sites of continual location and loss of the beloved brother. Of children begging for the uncle’s story but having to settle for the silver frame his story dissolves in. Sites of gold sequins worn and of folds in a wallet. Of the tears staining the linen suit bought by a mother ten years ago. Of melba toast, scarves, bars, oceans, and eyes kept down. Ultimately this book is an invitation to witness what Foulk calls “the parentheses of living,” conjured impressively with equal parts subtlety and heart-punch. Please read it.
Carolyn Zaikowski, poet laureate of Esthampton, Massachusetts, http://www.carolynzaikowski.com/
This collection of emotionally electric poems is a reminder that our identities are constructed from our bodies and our stories. On a poetic tour of cemeteries, bedrooms, locker rooms, and bars, Mary Foulk orchestrates the uncomfortable truth that the source of our redemption is found in what we have been denied by ourselves and by others. Poetry reclaims what was lost.
Michael Favala Goldman, poet/translator, author of Small Sovereign and What Minimal Joy, https://michaelfavalagoldman.com/
Mary Warren Foulk
A graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, Mary Warren Foulk (she/her) has been published in The Hollins Critic, Palette Poetry, Fjords Review, Silkworm, The Gay & Lesbian Review, and North American Review, among other publications. Her work also has appeared in Who’s Your Mama? The Unsung Voices of Women and Mothers (Soft Skull Press), (M)othering Anthology (Inanna Publications), and My Loves: A Digital Anthology of Queer Love Poems (Ghost City Press). She has two award-winning chapbooks, If I Could Write You a Happier Ending (dancing girl press) and Erasures of My Coming Out (Letter) (The Poetry Box).
Her newest collection, The Show Must Go On, was a finalist for the 2021 Gival Press Poetry Award, and the Inlandia Institute’s 2022 Hillary Gravendyk Prize, and a semi-finalist for the Word Works’ 2022 Washington Prize.