Poetry by Sarah Fox
April 23, 2014 • 5.5 x 8.25 • 180 pages • 978-1-56689-326-8
Affirmation, indictment, and essay, The First Flag resists the confines an insidious patriarchy places on our bodies, sexualities, and selves.
I want to tell you about etymology, transparency, excess, spontaneity, chance, and total embodiment. That aggression is propulsion toward visionary action. That we can resolve and transform ourselves through ever-malleable tools—psychoanalysis, myth and fairy tale, divination, allegory, incantation. Raccoons, birds, trees, sticks—all sorts of Whitman’s “divine materials”—are all around me and participating in the same life moment, and if I naturally am inclined to see the world as enchanted and conscious it doesn’t seem like appropriation. I want to tell you about excesses—of the body, the excessive astral body, excretions of the body and soul. I want to offer you a transcript of my human operating system and digress about the poet’s interest in, the poet’s political obsession with, origins, truth, beauty. I want to talk about so many things, flags and Ronald Reagan and cauls and succubi and symbols and shame and dismemberment and even things like Betsy Ross and Neptune in Pisces, and in so doing defend the nature and value of this thesis I’ve birthed and this essaying I can only dream-deliver, using that collectively-invented and collaboratively-sustained ball of fire called “Language.”
About the Author
Sarah Fox lives in Northeast Minneapolis where she co-imagines the Center for Visionary Poetics and also serves as a doula. She has taught poetry and creative writing at the University of Minnesota, the Perpich Center for Arts Education Arts High School, and to diverse populations in a variety of venues via the Loft, COMPAS, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and other community organizations throughout Minnesota for over 15 years. Coffee House Press published her book, Because Why, in 2006. She contributes posts on feminism, mysticism, astrology, and poetics to the multi-author arts and culture blog Montevidayo, and has won grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Academy of American Poets, and the Graduate Research Partnership Program at the University of Minnesota. Recent work appears in Conduit, Action, Yes, We Are So Happy To Know Something, Poetry City USA Vol 2, Spout, ElevenEleven, Rain Taxi, LUNGFULL!, and others. She performs poetry rituals and other acts of intersubjective communion in public and private spaces whenever she can.