PRAISE & REVIEWS

“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, Judge, on “What the Darkness Renders on the Question of Passing” | 2025 West Trade Review Poetry Prize winner

“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, Judge, on “A Way with Those Hands” | 2022 Bertolt Clever Award & 2022 Vera Meyer Strube Poetry Award honorable mention