Poetry. Skip Fox, with the concern of an entomologist, presents passages sprawling and pinned in a shadow box of observations and odd lots. Framed under double glass, the mounting board of AT THAT writhes with a cast of freaks: Ezekiel in the streets, a kitty bomb squad, sadists on steroids, the shadow of Cadmus, kingfishers, omen clad apertures of evening with cicada wings, heart attacks of clouds rolling in off the Gulf, a city mouse, spastic proctologists, and so forth, all projecting their "goods" in spate: smatterings, obsolete creeds, mordacious stumps, "furious opinions, exaggerations, fabrications," neo-prophetic stylings, verbal molestations, elegiac mumblings, the silence above a shallow grave, etc. Currently serving what appears to be a life sentence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Skip Fox has worked in woods, warehouses, shake and shingle mills, lumber yards, ketchup & catfood factories, mental hospitals, and so on.

At That

Literature & Fiction

Fox, Skip

Poetry

Ahadada Books

Poetry. DELTA BLUES is the fourth in a series of texts tentatively titled Dream of a Book. It was preceded by WHAT OF (Potes &amp; Poets), AT THAT (Ahadada Books) and FOR TO (BlazeVox). Reprising his role as entomologist, Skip Fox presents passages sprawling and pinned in a shadow box of observations and odd lots. Patrick James Dunagan writes that Fox "holds forth in the tradition of Stein and Williams with fluid experimental passages that hang on the page in a successful bopping between prose and poetry ... alongside the pleasure and beauty to be found is also the grotesque and absurd."

Delta Blues

"Prepare to be dazzled; the poet is one of our best. Here everything speaks, not only Adam and his serpent, the angels and their demons, but everywhere voices (are) steaming in the air like hot milk, and the wind rises to whatever Earth says when we listen. These poems will take your breath away. They will give you your life back. What discourse is not magic?"-- Rikki Ducornet

Sheer Indefinite:: Selected Poems, 1991-2011 (Contemporary Poetry (Uno Press))

University of New Orleans Press

Skip Fox’s Stormy Mondays reveals a pensiveness borne of long and deep experience. Fortunately, what also is revealed is infinite desire for. For love. For life. For humor. For awe. For blasphemy. For wit (never forget wit). For your existence, Reader. And Skip Fox gets your attention with poems that do many things including enchant—“enters through pores of music. Moment complete. Universals goosing each particular”—as well as memoir-prose that recalls things you, too, want to remember—“What was it like to have found it (poetry, open and fresh, incarnation pointing forward and back) as it came over the first years of the world’s horizon, when you could still search out Kerouac, say, and give him a blow-job if he wanted (purely out of respect).” There are gems here: it’s Skip Fox’s Monday. Push through and get into the smoke. Whatever happened before Monday, Monday also means a beginning. Read to feel the future lives offered by these fascinating word-doors.  —Eileen R. Tabios, author of AMNESIA: Somebody’s Memoir   A strikingly original voice in New American poetry—intelligent and wide-ranging: a questioner, a rememberer and a myth-weilder on a par with Olson, Dorn, Duncan,—in short, a discovery waiting to happen. Now is your chance to make it happen for you.  —Jesse Glass, author of The Passion of Phineas Gage and Selected Poems and Lost Poet, Four Plays.   Skip Fox learned to cook in a cast-iron pot over a camp fire. The proteins and carbohydrates are always profoundly local, liberated (he eschews barter) from the gardens and game preserves of the landed. The seasonings, on the other hand, are gleaned from any field available to a poet of his resources: a little self-deprecating swagger from Arkilokos, a full measure of Juvenal’s indignation; each taste a sufficiency of Catullus, Bertrand, Cavalcanti, Villon, Lyly, Jonson, Dryden, Blake, Mallarmé, Whitman, Pound, Tzara, Benn, Crane, Patchen, Dorn, Mayer, Mackey; often so well-blended as to make recognition of the individual ingredients irrelevant, but sometimes tasting pointedly of a particular donor. Salted with contempt, sweetened with understanding. Diners push away from the table feeling full but knowing plenty remains. There is no poet less exclusive nor any more essential. If you want to know what stew can be at its best, read this book. Taste of it; you’ll be back for another helping soon.  —Brian Richards, author of Enridged and Occasional Cleavage.    Young Poets! Lend an ear. “We cover the creature with glare, mute as mangled body parts, fender and grill (skirts with chrome panties).” Stormy Mondays is first class language assault. Skip Fox takes all-the-right-moves a step further. Burning up the page with true funk of a madcap joy in language born of working class intellectualism. An everyday neo-tautology of smooth ass millennial occult poetics spun out by one wisecracking emcee. “I wouldn’t’ve believed my own ears if it wasn’t for the words my mouth had been saying...” Poet-professors, cover your ears and pray for your students! It won’t be the same AWP this year.  —Patrick Dunagan, author of Drops of Rain / Drops of Wine.   Skip Fox is back, this time with Stormy Mondays, the fifth book in his epic Dream of a Book series. If it’s true (and it is) that we write one poem our whole life, then Skip’s found the trap door that includes everything. Bumper stickers, mini-novels, fortune cookies, and “Sure Shots” embroider themselves to create books within books as the poems “Passages” and “Structure of Rhyme” do in Robert Duncan’s oeuvre. Time to stick out your thumb, jump in the car, and sharpen your wit. You’ll get to know Skip quickly, he’s the same off the page as he is on–a hybrid universe of multiple voices communicating in whatever form they challenge to arrive in.  —Micah Ballard, author of AFTERLIVES.

Stormy Mondays

BlazeVOX Books

Poetry. WHAT OF by Skip Fox collects percepts and ruminations in a sprawling catalogue of poetic resolution. Fox uses a commonplace book manner of interest and utility, riding the diurnal shift to the next moment or perhaps. The 900 plus sections that comprise the book illustrate the dailiness of Fox's reading and writing, the lariat of his concern. "Where do linguists begin, language as contagious behavior?" A poem being, after all,a configuration of this word and that, that seems to have been with us forever. Within that extended instant of coming together, we look up in happy astonishment. WHAT OF is a tribal celebration.

What Of

Potes & Poets Press

At mid-century when teevee--a ten-inch Emerson--entered our lives, prize fighting was still a major sport and the Friday Night Fights (formally the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports) exhibited forms of the heroic closer to Pindar's models than those presently extolled on ESPN. Among the middleweights, Ray Robinson personified the classic virtues--grace, power, speed--but he was haunted by the battered face of Carmen Basilio: none of the above but the bastard wouldn't quit, despite moving up from welterweight to taste the Sugar. Skip Fox used to do a dandy Sugar Ray, but his later work more closely resembles Basilio's style, relentlessly stalking instances of coherence. It matters not the punch he takes, fielding hooks, jabs, uppercuts, the occasional bolo straight on, jaw out, eyes registering the quality of the light exploding in his brain. He's still shuffling, cutting down the ring; and when he gets it trapped in the corner, no room for tap dancing, he works the body implacably. The show is worth tuning in if you like to watch Nemesis at work. --Brian Richards Skip Fox is a scatter-shot Wittgenstein with an Ornette Coleman soul. He "lays on" better than Macduff inviting readers to dive (and surface with bloodshot eyes!), to excavate, or more properly, –to DIG! --Jesse Glass Spleen is a bulwark against pessismism, says Walter Benjamin in an essay on Baudelaire. Baudelaire was no pessimist. Neither is Fox. For To is catastrophe set in stone, the rock from which the language springs. Yet, as Benjamin goes further to suggest, [t]he devaluation of the world of things in allegory (Fox's prime land) is surpassed within the world of things itself by the commodity. One's expression is invariably taken over by a fetishist economy of signs, forcing mortality of the object into the picture. The gap between symbol and symbolized widens, and this is the girth of Fox's effort. Not to close it, but to see in its opening the futility, grace and perfectible wound that intimacy inflicts, the briefest of flowering lives, the orchid, the nectarine, and the like. E. M. Cioran, like Fox, a Cynic (and equally no pessimist) has it that [e]ternity is rot, and God a carrion which the human worm feeds on. Ed Dorn has noted that sensibility is no substitute for consciousness. And that's the point, certainly in our time: that the maggot be allowed to clear the skeleton. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, but purity alone is no match for freshness of invention. Inconsistency is itself what makes beauty so offensive. Every gesture we dare make is by definition deviant. As Giacomo Leopardi wrote, [t]here is nothing more rare in the world than someone who is usually bearable. In that sense, For To is the commonest of currencies. --Stephen Ellis

For To

Literary

In this futuristic comic-noir adventure-romance, General Von Steuben and iDex, the vast cloning empire with its dreaded Aught Division, are hell-bent to eradicate the Zero and thereby destroy whatever's left of humanity's dimensional stability. Only Max, a love-sumped, aging P.I., armed with just his two bare hands, "a small boy's notion of doing good," and a pack of smokes, stands between us and their nefarious intention. What unfolds: a blistering riot of tropes strung across a plot replete with a car chase, torture sequence, escape, quest and discovery, an outrageous imperative, a drowning, and even a cliff hanger with lightning and an exploding head. Will Max be able to save his two loves, Maxine and Dolly, from what appear to be horrendous fates? Can Max plant his charge before the idiot-savants at iDex have their way with the Universe? Perhaps. But few things seem less likely.  Praise for Skip Fox and wired to zone  Our hippest phenomenologist, Swiftian, ontologist of frass, Sadean, high priest of proctological slapstick, sorrowful, terribly funny, a celebrant of Eros, the enemy of oblivion and diminishing returns—Skip Fox is of the tribe of Cronenberg, Lautreamont, Jodorowsky, Hunter S. Thompson; he is the Keeper of Poe's raven and he is a master. wired to zone is unique in the history of the novel. —Rikki Ducornet  With wired to zone Skip Fox has crossed tech-noir with bio-punk to create something maddened and strange and utterly new, a kind of blue acid noir licking the flaps of its own pockets and not to be denied. A gorgeous and lurching dizziness of a novel. —Brian Evenson Welcome to the nuance parade of corporate genetic leftovers where "freaked and fractured thinking" reigns supreme. With "a pathos past all measure" amusing the muses is as primary to Skip Fox as smoking or breathing. Inside his "chemical stew" we're always almost nearly there and he arrives just in time, lurking at the threshold, leading us while being led. —Micah Ballard  Praise writing that tends exuberantly to its composition, enriched by long study and practice, language all generative actuality; characters that exist through act, rather than to represent actors; story not as plot but match with the Deep Blue of fatal logic; a hero stretched from Apuleius to Chandler, as well as two distressed demoiselles: one reincarnates Phoebe Zeitgeist, the other blends Cloned Dolly and Marilyn Monroe. Somebody is threatening zero, nothing, loss of neutrality, the ultimate MacGuffin. Passion of the digital. Them versus whatever we think we are. Praise this book by reading it. You will find it novel. —Brian Richards

wired to zone

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

Lavender Ink

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