Stormy Mondays by Skip Fox

Skip Fox’s Stormy Mondays reveals a pensiveness borne of long and deep experience. Fortunately, what also is revealed is infinite desire for. For love. For life. For humor. For awe. For blasphemy. For wit (never forget wit). For your existence, Reader. And Skip Fox gets your attention with poems that do many things including enchant—“enters through pores of music. Moment complete. Universals goosing each particular”—as well as memoir-prose that recalls things you, too, want to remember—“What was it like to have found it (poetry, open and fresh, incarnation pointing forward and back) as it came over the first years of the world’s horizon, when you could still search out Kerouac, say, and give him a blow-job if he wanted (purely out of respect).” There are gems here: it’s Skip Fox’s Monday. Push through and get into the smoke. Whatever happened before Monday, Monday also means a beginning. Read to feel the future lives offered by these fascinating word-doors.

—Eileen R. Tabios, author of AMNESIA: Somebody’s Memoir

A strikingly original voice in New American poetry—intelligent and wide-ranging: a questioner, a rememberer and a myth-weilder on a par with Olson, Dorn, Duncan,—in short, a discovery waiting to happen. Now is your chance to make it happen for you.

—Jesse Glass, author of The Passion of Phineas Gage and Selected Poems and Lost Poet, Four Plays.

Skip Fox learned to cook in a cast-iron pot over a camp fire. The proteins and carbohydrates are always profoundly local, liberated (he eschews barter) from the gardens and game preserves of the landed. The seasonings, on the other hand, are gleaned from any field available to a poet of his resources: a little self-deprecating swagger from Arkilokos, a full measure of Juvenal’s indignation; each taste a sufficiency of Catullus, Bertrand, Cavalcanti, Villon, Lyly, Jonson, Dryden, Blake, Mallarmé, Whitman, Pound, Tzara, Benn, Crane, Patchen, Dorn, Mayer, Mackey; often so well-blended as to make recognition of the individual ingredients irrelevant, but sometimes tasting pointedly of a particular donor. Salted with contempt, sweetened with understanding. Diners push away from the table feeling full but knowing plenty remains. There is no poet less exclusive nor any more essential. If you want to know what stew can be at its best, read this book. Taste of it; you’ll be back for another helping soon.

—Brian Richards, author of Enridged and Occasional Cleavage.


Young Poets! Lend an ear. “We cover the creature with glare, mute as mangled body parts, fender and grill (skirts with chrome panties).” Stormy Mondays is first class language assault. Skip Fox takes all-the-right-moves a step further. Burning up the page with true funk of a madcap joy in language born of working class intellectualism. An everyday neo-tautology of smooth ass millennial occult poetics spun out by one wisecracking emcee. “I wouldn’t’ve believed my own ears if it wasn’t for the words my mouth had been saying…” Poet-professors, cover your ears and pray for your students! It won’t be the same AWP this year.

—Patrick Dunagan, author of Drops of Rain / Drops of Wine.

Skip Fox is back, this time with Stormy Mondays, the fifth book in his epic Dream of a Book series. If it’s true (and it is) that we write one poem our whole life, then Skip’s found the trap door that includes everything. Bumper stickers, mini-novels, fortune cookies, and “Sure Shots” embroider themselves to create books within books as the poems “Passages” and “Structure of Rhyme” do in Robert Duncan’s oeuvre. Time to stick out your thumb, jump in the car, and sharpen your wit. You’ll get to know Skip quickly, he’s the same off the page as he is on–a hybrid universe of multiple voices communicating in whatever form they challenge to arrive in.

—Micah Ballard, author of AFTERLIVES.

There isn’t a wilder animal in the forest of language than Skip Fox. Not feral (never tamed), profligate though rarely seen, expert at camouflage in the thickets of poetry or prose or politics or philosophy or most any habitat normal humans find discomfiting, cunning vulpine capable of moving in utter silence, erasing its spoor as it goes, or noisy feints that send its terrified prey straight into its jaws, Fox skipped over the more tedious steps in the evolutionary chain and has lodged itself as a primal key in the ecology of the universe. Having learned a lesson or two from the drunken pomp of English equestrian semantics, Fox thrives in any climate or terrain, any phylum or category, any metaphor or mixed-up geography. You may not confront Fox head-on, but you’ll feel the chill of that quick glimpse from the corner of your eye.

—Bill Lavender, author of Memory Wing

Skip Fox dedicated his life to poetry while working in the woods on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula in the summer of 1969. He graduated from Bowling Green State University in 1981 and has since taught at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He lives by himself on a few acres in the country in a log cabin with a pond out back. Literature, art, music, film, drama, students, three children, and four grandchildren grace his existence.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 170 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-261-7

$16

Stormy Mondays by Skip Fox … by Geoffrey Gatza