Fox Frazier-Foley (Criticism, Poetry) | Los Angeles, CA

Fox Frazier-Foley is author of two prize-winning poetry collections, Exodus in X Minor (Sundress Publications, 2014) and The Hydromantic Histories (Bright Hill Press, 2015), and editor of two anthologies, Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity (Sundress Publications, 2016) and Among Margins: Critical and Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics (Ricochet Editions, 2016). She is co-creator, with Hoa Nguyen, of the forthcoming Tough Gal Tarot deck and book. Fox is founding EIC of the indie-lit press Agape Editions (http://agapeeditions.com), which is an imprint of Sundress Publications (a registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization) dedicated to publishing literary works that engage with concepts of the mystical, ecstatic, interfaith/intercultural, and the Numinous. Fox was graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Binghamton University, was honored with merit-based fellowships at Columbia University, where she earned an MFA, and was a Provost’s Fellow at the University of Southern California, where she earned a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing, with a focus on the confluence of violence, femininity, and spirituality in American poetry and film.

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Blurbs, Press & Reviews

Fox Frazier-Foley casts a spell in her stunning first book of poetry, The Hydromantic Histories. Divining both broken music and memorable speech from the waters of her grief and desire, her initiation into Haitian Vodou, and her remarkably innovative language, Frazier-Foley writes with a sacerdotal eloquence that arcs luminously, hauntingly, between the conceits of her Vodou and Christian hagiography and her gripping witness to scenes of loss and abuse. Frazier-Foley has been hurt into a poetry in which her “harmonies weave after/ mourn/ identify/ find the elusive thicket in which the every-/ where of this/ ceases.” Although one hears echoes of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Sylvia Plath in her poems, they are all hers, devotional and profane, elaborate and plain, scattered and linear, erotic and prayerful, fleeting, and permanent. The Hydromantic Histories is a paradoxical wilderness comprised of duende and chaos within the confines of masterful artifice. “The language of loss is ultimately elusive,” repeats the voice between the lines of these poems. This awareness instills Fox Frazier-Foley with the gift bestowed to strong poets, namely the talent to renew and shape language with an abandon that is also exquisitely crafted. I welcome The Hydromantic Histories as a rare first book with the lyrical efficacy and poetic vision to, as Ralph Waldo Emerson commented about the vatic role of poetry in general in his essay “The American Scholar,” “revive and lead in a new age.”
—Chard deNiord

How excellent to have in the feral and ferocious universe funked up patron saints who will concern themselves with everything from the absorption of celestial matter into form and form how the page becomes an altar for a too-scattered consciousness. But in this case the brain that ranges wider than the sky has the right of it: in sound and architecture of language may you find the map through the minefield, the mind felled, mined and felt. Fox, you sly Frazier-Foley, feel me and full me.
—Kazim Ali

Are you ready for ‘a new kind of snake in the chest’? For the violence and dazzle of apotheosis? For plenty of troubling–and beautiful–saint-on-saint action? Here comes Fox Frazier-Foley’s The Hydromantic Histories, a book possessed of a diction lush and spiked, spoken to a deep-running cast of martyrs, lovers, makers, and destroyers, and built upon the holiness of a whirlwind lyric “I.” Look out, reader: the speaker of these poems wants you “in pieces/the size of//Babylon.”
—Joshua Bell, author of No Planets Strike

Fox Frazier-Foley’s Exodus in X Minor offers us an extraordinary album of portraits drawn from the darkest reaches of upstate New York. Her broken figures are awash in drugs, death, and Spiritualism, and what hopes they have left seem raw and intimate, yet inevitably dangerous. The constellations of darkness that illuminate these poems begin to swirl into an accelerating vortex, and even the most righteous reader will have to face the risk of going down.
—David St. John

Fox Frazier-Foley chills us, makes hair bristle, palms sweat, in engaging bright language, in vibratory, sinuous poems. Exodus in X Minor traverses an unbounded inner being, alive at the crux of risk, and enters the world, trauma seeping outside-in through the poet’s porous lines. These vibrant poems take on gun death, hate crimes, spiritualists, pedophilia, the military industrial complex, yet hook up, electric and elegiac, with tales of parents as “self-made orphans,” past lives, occult ceremony. Frazier-Foley’s sensibility swerves to take you, to the very edge.
—Susan McCabe, author of Descartes’ Nightmare

Additional Reviews

• Exodus in X Minor, reviewed in Entropy
• The Hydromantic Histories, reviewed in The Rumpus
• “Twenty Questions with Fox Frazier-Foley,” Mary Pat Hyland (blog)
• Political Punch, reviewed in Grist Journal

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