How Shadows are Bundled
University of New Mexico Press, 2009
(126 pages, $21.95)
Point of No Return
La Alameda Press, 2005
(113 pages, $14.00)
Fish Drum Magazine Volume 15
Fish Drum Press, 1999
(76 pages, $6.00)
Sending the Body Out
Zephyr Press, 1986
(45 pages, $3.95)
Your Mythic Journey
co-author Sam Keen
Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam
(126 pages, $21.95)
Outlaws & Desperados: A New Mexico Federal Writers’ Project Book
compiled & edited by Anne Valley-Fox and Ann Lacy
Sunstone Press, 2008
(481 pages, $34.95)
Frontier Stories: A New Mexico Federal Writers’ Project Book
compiled & edited by Anne Valley-Fox and Ann Lacy
Sunstone Press, 2010
I write from the body. A poem is a physical thing: it breathes, it’s made of rhythm and sound and occupies a spatial dimension. A poem first breaks through consciousness as a vibration, which is why it is sensed long before (if ever) it’s comprehended.
A poet makes everything up, including one’s job description. My job: to retrieve rejected or edgy bits of inner material and put them together in ways that illuminate and provoke. My poems seek connections, complications, and small astonishments.
At times I say to myself that the world has no use for so much contemporary poetry—titles lined up on shelves (and now cyberspace) like so many wallflowers waiting to be plucked. But excess of songbooks and songbirds is hardly our problem. I wish for the world a chaotic abundance of poets, artists, performers, healers, magicians, dreamers and visionaries to counterbalance the steely force of prisons, governments, guns.
The words in a spirited poem want to shape themselves in our mouths and be sounded. This is sometimes enough. As the Greek poet Sappho wrote in the 7th century B.C., “Mere air, these words, but delicious to hear.”
News
Valley-Fox’s latest book How Shadows are Bundled is now out.
Read excerpts or order it from University of New Mexico Press (800-249-7737) or the shop.
Anne Valley-Fox has a new audio CD, Anne Valley-Fox Reads. Order from Vox Audio PO Box 594, Magdalena, NM 87825 ($7)
or contact Anne Valley-Fox.
Upcoming Readings
June 28, 7:30 p.m.
James A. Little Theater, Santa Fe, NM
Anne Valley-Fox will recite tempest-inspired poems by international poets with five other poets in collaboration with Theaterwork’s production of Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest.” Free, everyone welcome.
Sunday, October 3rd, 1:30 p.m.
Poetry Pavilion at the New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe
New Mexico Women Authors Book Festival presents Anne Valley-Fox reading from her work.
Recent Readings
May 13th at 7:30 p.m.
Moe’s Books in Berkeley, California
Reading from How Shadows Are Bundled
with Joanne Kyger
May 9th, 2 p.m.
Bird & Beckett Books & Records, San Francisco, California
Reading from How Shadows Are Bundled
with David Meltzer and Michael Rothenberg
April 25th at 3 p.m.
Bookworks in Albuquerque, New Mexico
Reading from How Shadows Are Bundled
Other Books
Work included in the following anthologies:
POEM: Poets on (an) Exchange Mission, Fish Drum, Inc. and Double Change, 2009
We Came to Santa Fe: Pennywhistle Press Anthology, Pennywhistle Press, 2009
In Company: An Anthology of New Mexico Poets After 1960, University of New Mexico Press, 2004
New Mexico Poetry Renaissance, Red Crane Books, 1994