Foxy Love by Matt Thomas

Review by Tommy Housworth

In 2022, U2 frontman Bono said that America “is a great idea that doesn’t yet exist.”   In Foxy Love, his third collection of poems, Virginia farmer, engineer, and poet Matt Thomas explores the spaces between that idealized utopia and the harsher realities that haunt the nation.

The America that Thomas lays out is one rife with contradictions: discrimination and unity, resilience and frailty, the cyan-blue of the skies and the insistent, creeping fog.  In particular, Foxy Love asks questions about our relationship to the natural world and how we show up in it: as allies and adversaries, to the land and to one another.

Activities that seem intrinsic to America receive fresh perspectives in poems like ‘At the Movies’ and ‘Flag Raising,’ the latter inviting readers to experience:

My country, secured
top and bottom

to kite the wind,
inching upward

above streaming breath, sewers,
eyes flashing border signals

while we watch, chin aspired
to the ritual of arriving

on our own immigrant shores

In a nation that has become more hostile toward those hoping to find a home here, this “ritual of arriving” feels different than what we were raised to believe.  This collection captures the remaining strands of hopefulness in that ritual of arriving and, as is vividly expressed in ‘The Dream,’ an awareness that “self-realization occurs in the weeds, free to those unashamed of their hunger.”

Inspired in part by a 1910 oil painting – and an accompanying poem – by Henri Rousseau, Thomas’ ‘The Dream’, explores a life that refuses to surrender to suburban domesticity, allowing “nature to cat up against you,” with overgrown trees and a yard that will “clothe us in contrast.” It is the invitation, a plea, really, for nature to continue encroaching on life so we never forget our connection to it.

Perhaps most striking is Thomas’ ability to recognize and reveal the dichotomy of defects and virtues that make up our world, particularly the people who populate it.  In ‘The Divine Scales,’ he mourns the death of a man who had been “a horrible racist, but kind to me.”

He imagines divine retribution in the afterlife for the man:

            I’m tempted to imagine an eternal reckoning
            but prefer to think
            that his meanness simply died with him
            and his kindness too…

It’s this kind of forthright recognition that one can hold two opposing truths that makes America such an enigmatic – and frustrating – nation.  Ideals about humankind and nature, upheld as noble, come crashing down in practice as greed and indifference often win the day.

And yet, Thomas ultimately finds redemption in the smallest moments of kindness – stopping to save a box turtle stranded on a busy country road in ‘Summer Blood,’ as he opines:

I’ve seen the hardest people do the same
brake suddenly, activate hazards
and door jutting into the middle of a two lane,
stoop to carry cold, cold blood
to where it wants to go.

Throughout Foxy Love, Thomas illuminates where we, as Americans – as humans – connect.  Where we find and give comfort to ourselves and one another.  These may be fleeting moments, but they are ones that keep hope out in front of us, a hope that we do better.  Be better. Despite our differences.