Fox Chase Review – Summer 2012

Fox Chase Review covers a wide range of poetry in which there is probably a poem for every one of us. While I didn’t love all of it, there were certainly several poems and poets in this issue that I loved. Stevie Edwards contributes two poems that really hit me in the gut. First is “What I Can Say I’ve Left, What I’ve Mourned”:

Fox Chase Review covers a wide range of poetry in which there is probably a poem for every one of us. While I didn’t love all of it, there were certainly several poems and poets in this issue that I loved. Stevie Edwards contributes two poems that really hit me in the gut. First is “What I Can Say I’ve Left, What I’ve Mourned”:

The empty of a bedroom with no closet
or bed. The hell of black mold swallowing
floorboards. I held a man’s wish in my belly
for weeks until it bled, until it emptied.

Next is “I Go Back to a House Party,” in which she imagines going back to the party where her mother looks up at her father “for the first time and smiles.” She wishes she could warn her of what is to come: “I want to tell her / in ten years he’ll say all his worst nights started with tequila: / two flipped cars, a drunk tank, punched out kitchen walls. / I want to tell her newborns are ugly, even // your own.”

John Dorsey offers great lines in his poems—some humorous, some just truthful—such as “if a tree falls in the woods / help it up” and “given enough time / we all learn / how to disappear” in his poem “volcano etiquette.” I also loved the lines “I plan to live forever / in the basement / of your heart” in “the iowa sutra.”

In “reduced to loose change,” James D. Quinton gives us short lines, most not longer than three or so words. It creates a great feeling of movement, like falling down the page:

I’ve never
felt like I
was worth much,
there were times
when I would
have taken
fifty sheets
for my soul

but it’s too
late now

she’s reduced
me
to loose
change

There is a lot of poetry here to dig through, so find a treasure of your own.
[www.foxchasereview.org]