The First Flag - Fox, Sarah

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Résumé :
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—...

Biographie:
all sorts of Whitman’...

Sommaire:
psychoanalysis, myth and fairy tale, divination, allegory, incantation. Raccoons, birds, trees, sticks—...

The First Flag is a mystic alimentary, blood, bone, and pearl poetics--utterly engaging in its seductive conversational tone. But it's an odd conversation as Fox periodically cries her brains out in ecstasy, disbelief, grief. It's a luminescent accomplishment, lush with decay, exploding with impossible meldings of stench and shimmer. By way of a powerful natal femininity she claws back the oral threads of her got-away story. I wanted to be right there when her words crowned. Her sentences deliver. It's not just that her language is a trip; she is really saying something you find you want to hear all the way down. And the footnotes are delightful. --Nor Hall Attention, human-born: 'THE WAR-TO-ETERNITY BLOWS LIKE BELUGA THROUGH MAN-HOLES ON 'THE BODY OF MOM.'' So announces Sarah Fox's new grimoire-cum-war-manual, The First Flag. This book is not fearless, but, like Notley's Alette, it pushes through fear as it pushes through membranes of harm, violence, toxicity, ill-inheritance, silence and suppression to retrieve a kind of knowledge from the opposite side. Fox's poetry is a disarming, potent striving after some as-yet-unparaphrasable element which might, eventually, be healing. So necessary is this battle-passage for the liberation of our desiccated moment that our new flag must bear a line of Fox's poetry: 'FUCK THE PATROLMAN AT THE BORDER. At any border, within or without.' --Joyelle McSweeney [Fox's poem 'COMMA'] marks the arrival of a strong new voice for our continuing poetry project.--Jacket2 The First Flag is an extremely complex and ambitious book, one that cuts through the dead-serious playfulness and studied poses of much other experimental poetry. It is a book fashioned from the quick and the dead, the raw and the cooked. In it, Sarah Fox has created something profoundly daring, unique, unsettling, and beautiful.--Tarpaulin Sky Press