"Centered on the experience of raising a special child and the cruelty 
we inflict on difference, these poems will break and heal your heart, 
their rage, hope, insight and love carried by a poetic power as 
targeted as a bullet-train. . . . this is an extraordinary debut from a 
writer wise, brave, darkly witty and unrelentingly inventive, one with 
a story to tell and a voice to make it sing."—Barry Spacks, First Poet 
Laureate of Santa Barbara and Commonwealth Club of California 
Poetry Medalist

"There's an allusion in these pages to Emily Dickinson's line about 
hope being the thing with feathers, and there is a lot of hope and 
determination in these fine poems about a mother's love for her 
autistic son. The poems travel from his birth through his pre-teen 
years, and the language is always precise, sometimes fierce . . . 
Dark Card illuminates with its darkness."—Robert Phillips, Series 
Judge


From "Too Soon"

My labor heaves up in great waves
like the moon-crazed tide;
it raves like the tide-crazed moon,
rising and rising too soon, too soon.


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REBECCA FOUST lives with her husband and three teenagers in 
Northern California. She graduated from Smith College and Stanford 
Law School and is starting Warren Wilson's low residency MFA 
program in January 2008. Her journal publications include Atlanta 
Review, Journal of the American Medical Association, Margie, 
Nimrod International Journal, North American Review and South 
Carolina Review. Her full length manuscript recently was a finalist 
for Poetry's 2007 Emily Dickinson First Book Award.