“A person puts forth a surface of legible order as they move through the everyday, but underneath that surface are the roiling energies of what’s dark, what’s broken. 'What the Darkness Renders on the Question of Passing' is a brilliant riff on that tension between interior and exterior. The poem broods on the self’s origami-like delicacy and keys-between-knuckles brutality. Restlessly moving from line to line and intensity to intensity, 'What the Darkness Renders on the Question of Passing' nevertheless has a keen lyric control, like needles threading shadow to skin."

— Rick Barot, Contest Judge on “What the Darkness Renders on the Question of Passing,” winner of the 2025 Poetry Prize in West Trade Review

“What I love most about Fox’s poem is how touch is everywhere, and always transformative: the barber’s “spit / landing on my forehead changing me,” or the realization that, “if I touch him back, / everything about me will be true.” This is a stunning, graceful narrative, as accessible as it is transcendent.”

— Michael Mlekoday, Contest Judge on “A Way with Those Hands,” the Honorable Mention poem for the 2022 Bertolt Clever Award and the 2022 Vera Meyer Strube Poetry Award