Fox Frazier-Foley

Jeffrey Pethybridge—Striven, the Bright Treatise Noemi, 2013 Page Length: 194 Retail: $25 A reality of the postmodern milieu is that a work must be understood not only by what it does but also by what it cannot possibly do. Language, we know, is a flawed and failing vehicle, always falling short of the nonverbal reality toward which it might be directed. Poetry, then, as a radical engagement with language, is a radical, perpetual experiment in failure. Jeffrey Pethybridge’s debut collection Striven, the Bright Treatise (Noemi 2013) is a monumental failure, but not on account of its brilliant machinery—rather, it fails because it must—because it seeks, quixotically, in Sisyphean adamance, to confront an impossible subject: the suicide of Pethybridge’s brother in 2007. Striven is mourning: a ritual toward acceptance—a stay against the effacement of history. In the book’s Appendix we find a eulogy dated 3/17/07. It begins: “We are speaking and [...]

Treed 2. Watercolor, marker and pencil on paper, 9×12” 2014 with H. Deskins is an artist and writer who examines womanhood, motherhood, and the body in her work and others. She’s exhibited in galleries nationally and published her art and writing internationally. She is founding editor of Les Femmes Folles, and illustrated Intimates and Fools (poetry by Laura Madeline Wiseman, Les Femmes Folles Books, 2014).

I Came Upon a Troll By Jason Pierre Every so often, I take these hour-long walks. I drift for miles at a time. It gives me a chance to look out at Los Angeles in a way I would never have done on the bus. One thing I’ve learned about this town is that it’s very segregated. Areas are designed to be cultural pockets for different communities and pride is held in the emotional ownership of a neighborhood. And these neighborhoods aren’t small. Los Angeles is a massive place. A neighborhood is like a town. And me? I’m a man on my feet, wandering through them as a stranger; belonging to no piece of land other than the footprint of pavement my feet touch for a tenth of a second as I walk. Recently, I walked under an overpass and saw a bed of massive rocks surrounding a gated entrance [...]

Dry Terrain If I could explain your desert, I would— the spines of your beard, your shoulder as stone, the tuft of dried grass struggling beneath it. I would roll the tumbleweed across your chest, or disrupt it with my fingers. Your abdomen is the silent side of a long expanse of dune, and I would cross it. I would leave my footprint or sweep my hand to brush it out. ​Something has skimmed across your sand: pinnate leaf of foot, stem of tail. I don’t have the languages for desert. I might be the water from a cactus; I might be unreliable and bitter. Maybe I am a storm. I rage and roil and think I make you different. You take in my relief, vanish me into you. Or I am the stone ​you hold in your mouth to stave off thirst. Most days, I know, I am nothing [...]

Oozing. Acrylic, ink on white paper, 18 x 24” 2014. is an artist and writer who examines womanhood, motherhood, and the body in her work and others. She’s exhibited in galleries nationally and published her art and writing internationally. She is founding editor of Les Femmes Folles, and illustrated Intimates and Fools (poetry by Laura Madeline Wiseman, Les Femmes Folles Books, 2014). is the author of the full-length poetry collections American Galactic (Martian Lit, 2014), Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience (Lavender Ink, 2014), Queen of the Platform (Anaphora Literary Press, 2013), and Sprung (San Francisco Bay Press, 2012). Her dime novel is The Bottle Opener (Red Dashboard, 2014). She is also the author of two letterpress books, nine chapbooks, and the collaborative book Intimates and Fools (Les Femmes Folles Books, 2014) with artist Sally Deskins. She is the editor of Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth [...]

iii. If man should raise hands to breach the throat of his father, feed him garlic. Who else but an imp should eat it? It’s reaper-cruel. Dog food. The pagan’s stinking rose. Hemlock in the belly, vipers in the blood. Canidia, the Grey One, had a hand in this dish, I’m sure. That other witch Medea poured garlic over Jason to help him bind the fire-bulls; its stink repelled their breath. She gave garlic to his mistress, too, then flew away on her serpent-bird. All women are best avenged with gifts. Neither the dry southern cities nor sweaty Hercules, he of the burned shoulders, know anything like this starry steam. And should you desire another springtime jest, dear Son of Kings, remember my countercurse: “May all women oppose you with hands and push you out of their beds.” iv. My quarrel is with you, [ ]. Even the wolves and [...]

The poems in Untying the Knot (Kelsay Books, 2014), by Karen Paul Holmes, detail her two-year journey through a gamut of trials that rival Job’s. As the title suggests, divorce is the over-arching disaster. With what Thomas Lux described as grace, humor and self-awareness, Holmes relates the year in which she learned that her husband of 30 years was sleeping with one of her close friends, her mother had terminal Lymphoma, and her brother had a life-threatening cancer requiring dangerous surgery. None of these griefs had been foreshadowed; in confessional, free-verse poems, Holmes reaches out to her reader, perhaps the only friend she trusts with the foreign thoughts cycling through her mind during the sanity shaking upheaval in her formerly charmed life. Unsurprisingly, the themes of this book include heartbreak, denial and anger, but the transcendent theme is the author’s flight from bitterness, which she feels might swamp her life. [...]

I used to date a woman with exceptional taste in art. She kept a steady rotation of coffee table books in her living room, my favorite of which was an enormous hardcover filled with paintings by Lucian Freud. We would be watching television, or trying to have a conversation, or making out, and I’d inevitably find my eyes and my hands returning to that gorgeous book: the incredible depths of the flesh tones—portraits that, regardless of the model, straddled the line between the beautiful and the ugly in a way I found helplessly entrancing. It became a point of contention: “Why are you still looking at that book?” “Yes I have seen that one before.” “No. He doesn’t care. He’s a dog.” Coffee table books are a delicate matter: if you want to play it safe, go with Ansel Adams or a book of funny church signs—guests will flip quickly, [...]

Circe You walked into my garden and shook your head at the Parliament of swine there assembled. You cursed my name, called me witch, meddled with my drinks for fear of poison. Yet, you had the taste to love me first. How I lost my appeal seems unfathomable now. Were you afraid of my powers? No doubt. You knew I held infinity in the palms of my hands. Circe Ti addentrasti nel mio giardino e scuotesti il capo alla vista del Parlamento di maiali lì radunato Maledicesti il mio nome, Mi chiamasti strega, rovistasti tra i miei drink per paura del veleno. Eppure avesti il gusto di amarmi prima. Come persi il mio appeal sembra inconcepibile adesso. Temevi i miei poteri? Senza dubbio. Sapevi che tenevo l’infinito tra le palme delle mie mani. Dream I dream giraffes on fire, but the walls of my room are made of asbestos and [...]

A Sanctioned Babel: On fleshing out text, a visit with Cecil Taylor, and a re-wilding of language. “The pleasure of the text is the moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I do.” —Roland Barthes, from The Pleasure of the Text … Literary rabbit holes, as all religious readers know, are real. When we read a book, we do not only activate our eyes, we use our entire bodies. But it is not just the tactile experience of touching paper or buckram, parchment or vellum, that does this, not this, although the weight and feel of a book is much more than just a sensory perk. In an article in Scientific American last year, Ferris Jabr discussed some of the research that has been going on regarding screen-reading versus reading on paper. The brain reads letters as physical objects that live [...]

Brandon Molyneaux is a visual and alternative sculpture artist from upstate New York. He uses a variety of non-traditional media, including paper, glue, circuitry, and electricity to build lighted sculpture out of raw material.

A review of Anne Bauer’s Fine Absence, by Jennifer MacBain-Stephens In Anne Bauer’s poetry chapbook, Fine Absence ( 2011), loss is revealed through the completion of small domestic rituals. In the chapbook’s first poems (“Old Tapes, “Thank You,” “Eulogy,”) the reader does not know who or what is “absent.” Allusions are made to small disappearances: the prose poem “Thank you” is about a secret that we never discover– the father does not bring down wrath on his daughter (it wasn’t just about stealing beer or cigarettes; she says as much in the poem): “…the excuses that limped, pewling, out of my mouth and died on the floor between us, not a word of judgement or recrimination. One thing caused banishment, only one thing, one time. Months passed and we spoke again, but never of that, or what happened to me, alone in that silence.” Although Bauer does not reveal what [...]

Fancy Dance Boy Eating Homestyle Lord Hundred Chief Benway played pants berzerkus only pissed himself imagine childhood smile smelling Indian write Sub Committee Senate Select! Prolapse importante Winnetou that would show lame dumb blind diss-ected beasts how to live son — Blame Black Elks tracking number invalid pornographic public sad how fast can you run how fast your heart how fasting broke your hard on love Sagamore Benway say power puking — all my relatives! — you’re too hard on sacred wheatsheaf carry carry concussive cap knocko yoman runned revolver holding chain sacred three-legged pitbull Cochise of generations fought and never lost Seminole-souled bedded down sustain anyone breaking lust list wife pregnant another’s monarch bitter pow pow butterfly organophosphate barrel drummed hey-heya hey heyyyyy hokey poke! chested barrel thrown off canvass sailed ships into holes drilled in Arctic ice rusting holy Father rustled horses from rustling fathers white collared black [...]

The Projectionist In my dream, he’s a projectionist at an empty theater and I am winding the long staircase to his stadium of red high-backed chairs waiting for something to fill them. In this dream, we are still in love, and he is queueing Alice for us, the screen flickering from black to the strange forests of green only real in film. He latches his arm around my shoulders, and out of all that darkness comes a single wedge of light. On the Third Month of Separation ​“Well,” Alice thought to herself. “After such a fall as this, I shall ​think nothing of tumbling down-stairs!” In the South, sometimes heat is the closest thing to love. The days reduced to wet blanket air and fearless waterbugs. In this new absence called separation, I have become night-bound with voices in a phone and three-dollar chardonnay. The first day, I drink myself [...]

Detail shot from Medusa in her Sunday Best, oil on canvas. MANDEM is the art name shared by Maize Arendsee (an art instructor and Studio Art MFA student at Florida State University) and her life-partner, Moco Steinman-Arendsee. Drawing on an academic background in classical mythology, gender studies, and critical theory, MANDEM works across media and materials (painting, assemblage/collage, film, sculpture, and book-making), intentionally destabilizing genre in terms of content and media. MANDEM has received numerous art awards, including Juror’s Merit at the LaGrange National XXVII (2014) and First Place at the FSU Museum of Fine Art Summer Annual Exhibition (2014). While being widely published and nationally exhibited, MANDEM remains actively involved in the Tallahassee art scene. (www.MythpunkArt.com) Artist Statement: We are a transdigital artist. Our art is an exercise in categorical violations, simulation, and narrative (translation: we are makers, rule-breakers, tricksters, and storytellers). We work across media and materials: painting, [...]