with Allison Hedge Coke & Kristen Kaschock
mnartists.org with Shannon Gibney
Kicking Wind with Kate Greenstreet
***
Praise for The First Flag:
“The First Flag is a mystic alimentary, blood, bone, and pearl poetics—utterly engaging in its seductive conversational tone. But it’s an odd conversation as Fox periodically cries her brains out in ecstasy, disbelief, grief. It’s a luminescent accomplishment, lush with decay, exploding with impossible meldings of stench and shimmer. By way of a powerful natal femininity she claws back the oral threads of her got-away story. I wanted to be right there when her words crowned. Her sentences deliver. It’s not just that her language is a trip; she is really saying something you find you want to hear all the way down.”—Nor Hall
“The masterpiece of this extraordinary collection is a hexagonal 36 poem cycle, ‘Comma’. Sarah Fox envisions herself as a separation daemon in a birth theater. By exorcising the hordes and weevil casts of her uteral spectres and conceiving of the ‘family romance’ as mantic veins to be pumped, she achieves the denouement of becoming fully (not just physically) born. Birth as apocalyptic breakdown; the work? Imaginal punctuality.”—Clayton Eshleman
“This book is not fearless, but, like Notley’s Alette, it pushes through fear as it pushes through membranes of harm, violence, toxicity, ill-inheritance, silence and suppression to retrieve a kind of knowledge from the opposite side. Fox’s poetry is a disarming, potent striving after some as-yet-unparaphrasable element which might, eventually, be healing. So necessary is this battle-passage for the liberation of our desiccated moment that our new flag must bear a line of Fox’s poetry: ‘FUCK THE PATROLMAN AT THE BORDER. At any border, within or without. ”—Joyelle McSweeney
* * * * *
Praise for Because Why
“Sarah Fox has found a way to create spaces where different sensibilities—lyric, narrative, surreal—can coexist and change, one into another. This fullness of range allows moments of complete surprise when Fox shifts from one tone to another. Because Why is an accretion of motions, of touchings upon words, into a primarily aural sense of the relationship between idea and feeling.” —Bob Hicok
“Here we have strange combinations, surreal deliveries, and reliable musical syntax. This is how the theory of relativity begins to manifest itself in the poetry of our time. Words are almost only sounds, pressed forward by an anxiety of objectless activity. ‘Days are short here, nights / shorter. We sleep / like blind sailors in beds // that deliver us secretly home.’ In this new poetry we can begin to trace the way our thinking behaves. Everything that is, now is not. Why not? Because.” —Fanny Howe
“Fox’s Because Why rearranges syntax in a fluid landscape in which a horse can become a cactus and a teenager a tree. The experience is a lot like wandering through a hedge maze that is at the same time a tightrope stretched over a large canyon, a travelogue and the dark side of the moon.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“These are not narrative poems with easy-to-grasp ‘aha’ moments, and yet, they are exquisite renderings in ink that will leave you thinking . . . [Fox’s] work has a deeply personal vein running though it that clearly draws on her experience as a woman, a mother and a doula.” —Madison Capital Times
“An engaging collection of evocative and original poetry. . . Because Why showcases the focus and brilliance of Fox’s wordsmithing imageries”—Midwest Book Review
“Sarah Fox has found a way to make poetry both experimental and accessible. Her poems are strange but strike a deep chord. They are playful and dark, thought-provoking and silly. . . . A wonderful read for both the well-versed poet and a general audience.” —Altar Magazine
“In equal measures absurd, existential, and just plain exhilarating, Because Why eloquently expresses the strange times in which we live, without resorting to the erudite, self-conscious tricks that have come to be the hallmark of so much postmodern poetry.” —mnartists.org
“Visually as well as verbally exciting.”—Jacket
“This edgy, energetic, and irreverent first collection introduces a poet we’ll hear from again.”—Library Journal
“Part joy, part mandate, part irreverence and all poetry . . . Fox’s poems continually press out into the margins of consciousness and understanding.”—Xantippe
“Sarah Fox has given us a gift—each poem in this thrilling collection inhabits a quotidian mystery, yet always tugs at the limits of knowing, pushing into dreamscape, into realms of the unconscious. Art, science, pop culture, religion, motherhood, loverhood—all are gathered here in the necessary service of dumbstruck awe. Read the whole book, then read it again.—Nick Flynn
“Sarah Fox’s poems buzz with energy and imagination. Sometimes it’s a slide show at ten frames per second; sometimes it’s an alchemical crock-pot simmering with the indignation of witness. Sometimes it’s a dive through the possibilities of a holographic syntax. —Dale Pendell
PSYCHOMAGICALESQUE / (PMS) 