Fox Frazier-Foley

Point-Blank Sonnets: Jessica Piazza’s Interrobang Why did the interrobang fall out of fashion‽ The title of Jessica Piazza’s debut poetry collection is also the punctuation mark, “designed for use especially at the end of an exclamatory rhetorical question,” according to the Merriam-Webster citation that serves as one of the book’s epigraphs. Every good book raises some questions, but Interrobang is itself a question, as well as an event: the chronicle of a speaker whose emotional awareness is matched only by a nearly incredible attention to language. Piazza deconstructs and reassembles her words as she moves—through a relationship, through the world, and through the structure of the sonnet, her vehicle of choice. This is a form that has persisted through the ages: a challenge, a teacher, and a unit of meaning that even modern curricula are obliged to include. Piazza helps us understand this sustained appeal by taking the sonnet beyond [...]

On the metropole walkside, he watched in the dimming light. She stood in the window- frame rolling down her stockings She stood rolling down her stockings She stood in the the window-frame her foot on the ledge of windowsill raised and rolling down her stockings pale against the pale light pale rolling down her stockings She stood In the window-frame she stood one arm stretched, tall, high above her head She stood rolling down her stockings in the window-frame one arm hooked around one arm stretched, tall, above high above her head and pale rolling down her stockings constellations spread along her thighs spilling down her navel down her thighs rolling down her stockings breasts in the pale light one arm stretched, taught along her taut along her belly A spill of light She stood in the window-frame nude but for her rolling down her stockings. Longing Along the Long [...]

In case you didn’t hate me enough already I want implants. I want Botox tips from my mother. I want to zap the spider veins right out of my long, pretty legs. I want to wear lipstick, wax my eyebrows, wax my pussy, wax my stubborn upper lip. I want to wear designer dresses, designer shoes. I want to burn every pair of jorts I ever owned. I want to submit and submit and submit. The last time a man on the street told me I was beautiful, I said thank you. I am a thief We met in a museum – your head was tilted up, face blurred. I could never see your shoes, though I tried. We followed each other up and down staircases, between beetle- gnawed taxidermy displays, met at the feet of the Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil and there is no metaphor here. There was a spoon [...]

The Magic Word: ‘Gypsy’ Witchcraft, Love, and Breaking Tradition in Luminiţa Mihai Cioabă’s Poem “The Apparition of Choxani” “Magic,” she said, “is only in words, in the naming.” - Qristina Zavačková, from “Magic and Magpies—Akhaljiben the Kakaraske” I first discovered Luminiţa Mihai Cioabă, Romanian-born Romani poet and fiction writer, when I bought Roads of the Roma: a PEN anthology of Gypsy Writers, in preparation to teach my class on Romani literature, culture, and representation at Florida State University. Cioabă, a speaker of Rromanès (Kalderash dialect), Italian, and Romanian, writes about Romani women’s lives and experiences, often drawing on Romani folktales. Her poem, “The Apparition of Choxani” (116), narrates the appearance of a witch to the speaker, the two kisses they share, and the resulting arc of desire; the piece is enchanting both as an artwork and as a critical puzzle. The version I shared with my students, translated from Italian [...]

This is an amazing week for our Infoxicated Corner. The pieces I’m blessed to share with y’all fit together by their own fortuitous kismet, in a whirling conversation about the intersection of danger and desire — the things that simultaneously attract us and threaten us.

I’m very excited to publish the below essay by Jessica Suzanne Reidy, which looks at a Romani poem about the apparition of a witch, a traditional character in Romani folkore. In the interest of readers fully understanding the culture that this poem (and this essay) come from, I would like to provide a brief introduction and some context. Romani denotes the ethnic group more commonly referred to as Gypsies. Dr. Ian Hancock, Romani linguist and scholar, explains in Roads of the Roma that the first Romani were likely many groups of people in Northern India, from low-caste Indians to African migrants, sent to fight an invading Muslim army, around the 11th century C.E. After the war was lost, most of the enormous army moved with their families through the mountains and West toward Europe (Hancock, 15-17). Throughout the journey, Romani were met by hostile and xenophobic locals. They endured a [...]

Note: The Hesperides are divine nymphs in Greek myth who tend a blissful garden in some idyllic corner of the Western world, and are associated with the golden light of sunset. Some images from the original archive are unavailable. Patty Hyland is a freelance illustrator in the NYC metropolitan area. She is currently working on her first webcomic, Tri-UMPH!, a humorous seafaring adventure epic. You may find more of her work on her and pages.

In 2011, Binghamton, a small industrial town in upstate New York (formerly where IBM was headquartered), was hit by a flood that ravaged the quasi-rural area. Among the casualties of the flood were MacArthur Elementary School and MacArthur Park. These photographs were taken for archival purposes by N. Henry, a social scientist and cartographer at Binghamton University. The tops of a children’s swing set and jungle gym and the rooftops of the elementary school are visible; the reflections of sky and treetops visible in the flood waters give an odd, uncanny sense of brightness, of natural calm and beauty even in a disaster that fiscally devastated most of the quasi-rural area. For me, they cross the blurry boundary between archive and art / journalism and something more transformative. If humans are the part of nature that goes against nature’s grain, it might also be said that nature is an aspect [...]

Requited: Poetry as a Truth-Telling Mechanism The effectiveness of Kristina Marie Darling’s book Requited lies in its ability to remind readers that it is human nature to crave to be what we are not. To crave what we don’t have. Darling treats poetry as a truth-telling mechanism. This is a book that is aware of itself, its truths, and how it wants to tell them. The self-referential nature of this text urges the truth to make itself known. It enables the use of poetry as a truth-telling device, and reminds the reader of fundamental truths. The book is the chronicle of a couple’s relationship, and their eventual parting. We begin the story in a garden, which might be a nod toward to the Garden of Eden, and what it symbolizes for us: a clean slate; new beginnings; fresh starts. Gardens and forests are so richly associated in Western literature with [...]

I am an unrelenting bellow In the dream I open the door. I watch her dandelion head. She is walking away. My arms catch her and I ask why. I ask where. She tells me she was going to ask where six four five street is. The numbers are a jumbled way of counting. She is too little to walk away and where is your brother. She can’t seem to tell me: he is hiding I pushed him out the boat he followed me here. I start by opening more doors to smaller spaces, using my hands, afraid of touching him if he isn’t alive. These places are impossibly small, closets packed with winter jackets. So we move into the park and I am yelling his name I am an unrelenting bellow. I say it like it’s the only word in the world. I am holding my daughter’s hand and [...]

On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which questioned whether American poets still produce political work, and suggested that “literary [political] provocation in America is . . . at a low.” Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, [...]

Political Punch is officially over! Or, at least, this first installment of it is. It was both surprising and gratifying that people responded to it as they did — it went on three times longer than I had intended it to, and it generated enough interest that I could probably have kept it going for at least another three weeks, were I not beginning to feel hopelessly overextended. Though it’s definitely time for me to step away from this project, and focus my time & energy on other responsibilities for a while, I wanted to take a minute to offer my deep and happy thanks to everyone who participated in this series — by contributing work to it, reading it, talking about it, helping promote it on the internets, or quietly enjoying it through individual visits to the Infoxicated Corner over the past three weeks. It was a very fulfilling [...]

On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which questioned whether American poets still produce political work, and suggested that “literary [political] provocation in America is . . . at a low.” Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, [...]

On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which questioned whether American poets still produce political work, and suggested that “literary [political] provocation in America is . . . at a low.” Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, [...]