Extravagant Rescues : Poems

How far from our imperfect human selves have we traveled? How shall we recover what is left, live within our man-made technologies built to be more powerful than us, and still keep a sense of humor? Extravagant Rescues, a sublime collection of poetry, lays bare the human and poetic brilliance of a man immersed in capturing human beings’ mortal splendor and frailty within their own technology and flaws.

The poems ask questions with hymnlike couplets, in a language of the gospel of empathy. We are allowed to rethink our choices, question and be wary of our machinery, and, in the end, with metaphors that channel feelings of loss, humor, and compassion, we are reminded “to come, and dream, with eyes wide open / and set within the vessels of our waking selves, / of ever more intricate schemes, extravagant rescues.”

BRETT FOSTER (1973–2015) was an associate professor of English at Wheaton College. A past Wallace Stegner and Elizabethan Club fellow, his poetry and criticism has appeared in Raritan, the Kenyon Review, Best New Poets 2007, and Books & Culture, among other publications. His book The Garbage Eater was published by Northwestern University Press in 2011.

JEFFREY GALBRAITH teaches English literature and creative writing at Wheaton College. His scholarly work has appeared in the journal Restoration and the edited collection Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination. His poems and reviews have appeared in Cresset, Yemassee, RHINO, Southern Humanities Review, the Florida Review, and Harvard Review.