Fox Frazier-Foley

LOTUS BLOSSOM REJECTS HER INTERMINABLE VIRGINITY A lotus root is a wheel cut full of hollows, a buoyant vessel with rowed chambers like port windows, framing the faces of those too restless to die at home. The lotus claims no relation to the water lily, a stationary and easily drowned lookalike who never discovered the benefits of hydrophobic skin. Rather, the closest living relatives of the lotus are the sycamore family. They too grow to be hollow giants with monoecious flowers, capable of pleasuring themselves. When the lotus flower opens its sex, it does so slowly. After the long unfurling strip, the petals will curl again in the evening. On cool nights, the lotus flower generates its own heat, offering a warm cradle to any visiting beetle or bee. The lotus stamen soaked in tea recalls limbs tangled together in a shower, limp and slow and wise. She has done [...]

During 2016, we will shine the spotlight of our public esteem & rapt attention on two poets per month. This month’s first poet is Jasmine An. Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world – what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape? Jasmine An: I think that poetry fits my creative process because I am a slow thinker and not necessarily a visual one. Often times, I write poems to learn and to sift through my own thoughts. I won’t know the entirety of what I was attempting to say with a poem until I reach the often times surprising conclusion. There are other slow mediums in the world: oil paint, granite, gardening, but I trust my mind’s eye, [...]

During 2016, we will shine the spotlight of our public esteem & rapt attention on two poets per month. This month’s second poet is Bonafide Rojas. Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world – what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the Poe-biz landscape? Bonafide Rojas: I push myself harder than anyone else can to get better, especially when i don’t feel “creative” i push to write. I challenge myself by writing with forms that have constraints. I’ll write fifty haikus, twenty villanelles, or ten sestinas for me, no one really ever sees those poems. They’re for me to look at, to have, being consistent is key, longevity is a gift. Those are also my main points of motivation. Understanding longevity [...]

Thirty Ways of Looking at a Nuyorican I. i do not wake up to roosters, i wake up to construction sights & exhaling buses II. english was fed to me by my television baby sitter III. i barely know what oceans look like orchard beach & brighton beach do not count IV. rice & beans are in cans, i know how to grow culture but barely food V. my skin is pale, my cousin’s skin is black we are called white boy & negro at the same time on the same table VI. i do not know how to hotwire a car VII. i have a fear of needles, so being a junkie is out but being a thief is (only sometimes) VIII. i have more books than articles of clothing IX. as i remember it, i’ve been called jewish more times after i turned twenty one, for whatever reason [...]

Waadookodaading Drum at the Wisconsin State Department of Agriculture, Trade & Consumer Protection Consultation with Tribal Leaders meeting at the LCO Convention Center, 10/8/14; or: MVI_8407 I can’t stop watching this YouTube video: of seven little Indian boys with their switches in hand and they begin to sing. How can you stand this? I would ask my mother at each Pow Wow, young and heartless, before it became a homecoming, their pitched wail, fevered yips and arpeggios, how the longer you stayed they were like wolves, then crows, then, eventually, the river, too. Oh yes, the river moves like this, sometimes broken by tributaries, but carried by momentum, sometimes the floodplain and one stick at a time strikes and all pick up again together like a shared lung. We who stand at the corners of this carpeted space, most likely another casino convention room if it’s anything like ours, we [...]

During 2016, we will shine the spotlight of our public esteem & rapt attention on two poets per month. This month’s first poet is Kenzie Allen. Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world – what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape? Kenzie Allen: One of the things I love about poetry is that ideally it becomes a fractal. The smallest parts of it, sentence, line, word, can each be a poem. Like a good sketch, there’s space and negative space in the poem, what is depicted and what is inferred, and the drawing’s refinement upon initial impressions through revision. Poetry draws upon music, the visual, performance, and ultimately is a celebration of language. It’s also the creation of [...]

Poetry Blog’s Infoxicated Corner has nominated the following poems (and poets) for 2015’s Best of the Net: Annie Won’s “The Nine Circles of IKEA” Jezmina Von Thiele’s “Transfiguration of the Black Madonna: Gypsy Goddess, Gypsy Saint” Leigh Anne Hornfeldt’s “Dilemma” Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie’s “Blue Libation” Margaret Bashaar’s “There Is Really No Such Thing As Winning” Saba Razvi’s “Gingerbread Girl” We were privileged to give these poems a home, and wish only that we could have nominated even a bit more of the amazing work with which we’ve been graced in the past year. Looking forward to 2016’s poetry features! Until then: onwards, and with love.

Sarasvati Sarasvati at the river in the gaze of a goose foraging like I am at her banks through gratitude and fear willing that some bridge appear carry me down the middle of this way mapped by blood and memory she sees me wraps me in her veil shows me her name everywhere in river reeds and starlings honey mirror at the bottom of my tea the billboard I see reads: the path is clear I am ready Listen to the audio version of this poem . GROW Me… Mine… My… You will all expire whether your spine is crushed in 9 places or your body just runs out of breath and right after your death some other voice talking through dirt shaped into skin will walk on electric currents to the timer ticking down the days while singing the same damn song you sang a solo called ego composed [...]

Montana Ray is the author of , published this year by Argos Books. Intrigued by the poem she sent me for TheThe’s Infoxicated Corner (also appearing here today), I asked whether she’d be interested in doing a Q&A on the blog as well. Here’s the deeply enjoyable conversation that ensued: Fox Frazier-Foley: Tell me a little bit more about the project of (guns & butter). Did you know from the start that you wanted to write a book of gun-shaped poems? How did that come together? What is your overall vision for the book? And, other than the beautiful sonic resonance between the two words — what’s butter got to do with it? (I mean, I guess butter has to do with everything for some of us. My family is mostly from the American South, and we cook with lots of butter, ha.) Montana Ray: Thanks for your questions, Fox! [...]

Bury the Girls, Then Bury Their Babies The face of a young girl stares out from the cover of Fiddle is Flood (Blood Pudding Press, 2015), Lauren Gordon’s stark and awe-inspiring chapbook. Her hair intermingles with a collage of sky, vines, bare legs. Another girl lies on her back along the bottom, looking up, wistful, white skin gleaming. Though a black-and-white ink drawing, the girls’ lips are plump, pouty even. A bursting red flower, scattered amongst the scrolling detail, is the only color. Gordon created this cover herself; the lush, rouge flower provides readers a visual, introductory cue for her explosive poems that circle sex and death. Through Gordon’s sparse words and lyrical lines such as: I will cut the bluestem grass in the blazing sun I will walk through swarms of white butterflies to lug the big brown jug to lug the wild cool creek Gordon creates her own [...]

Keisha-Gaye Anderson is author of the poetry collection (Jamii Publishing, 2014), which has been described as “a lyrical outpouring of kinship, heritage, and a woman’s transformation within the world that envelops her . . . a rich compendium of heartfelt poetic verse.” As both a writer & reader of mystical poetry, I found her work lovely and compelling, and invited her to the Infoxicated Corner for a conversation about her aesthetic, influences, process, and work overall. Fox Frazier-Foley: I first learned about your work from your book, Gathering the Waters, which I was drawn to read because I thought the cover was so lovely and striking. Can you tell us a little bit about the genesis of that book? What was your process like in creating it? And how did you find this beautiful cover art, or was it created specifically for the book? Keisha-Gaye Anderson: I’m constantly writing. I [...]

Montana Ray is a feminist poet, translator, and scholar. She is the author of five chapbooks and bookworks. Her first full-length poetry collection, (guns & butter), is now available from Argos Books. She’s a PhD student in comparative literature at Columbia University and the mom of budding zoologist, Amadeus.

Phone Booth Parable So much has gone missing where are the words our parents read aloud long storks on the bedroom wall midflight I never got a good look at what they carried all that way to the window why fly when the ground is so good at pulling you down said the scarecrow how’s the reception on your end is it better to persuade or just push your tongue into my mouth a little taste of what wrong numbers can do said the tin man whose speech should be good for another few miles already the moon over bruise over stubble shorts out when so many TVs howl at once said the lion we’ll come back as dogs to bury our own bones but time is a limiting factor I’ve stepped onto platforms only to be told I missed the boat and my beloved whistling out at sea for [...]

Editor’s Note: Marguerite Van Cook and James Romberger are the artists whose collaborative graphic novel, Late Child (Fantagraphics Books, 2014), tells the intimate, autobiographical story of the struggles Van Cook and her mother faced during World War II and after, as Van Cook, a child born out of wedlock, came of age and learned how to seize her own voice and power in an aggressively sexist and classist society. Alex Dueben interviews them here about the stories ehind the book, and their processes and conversations in creating it. Exploring the Personal and Political Landscape of The Late Child and Other Animalsby Alex Dueben The new book The Late Child and Other Animals opens at the height of World War II with the co-author’s mother and aunt on top of Portsdown Hill, watching the city of Portsmouth burn. That haunting and beautiful image sets the tone for the book. The Nazi [...]

Dilemma If I tell my son his mouse is dying I may as well tell him the rest: her shallow breath means her lungs are deflating, causing the rest of her organs to slowly betray her. If he asks me if it’s painful, well. What can hide him from that truth? Her cage is littered with her loss of strength: untouched water bottle, food pellets staling in the pink plastic bowl. If I tell him she’s dying I may as well tell him the worst of it, that his father and I knew exactly what we were doing when we encouraged him to choose her, the fastest mouse of the dozens of albinos in the pet store’s glass aquarium, yes, we brought her home to die and hoped that in his grief he might learn the hard fact of life. We named it mercy. We named it introduction. Better now [...]