Foxy Love: All-American Poems - Paperback

by Matt Thomas (Author)

These poems creep over the reader with a kind of naked wildness: kudzu vine consuming the trees, racing water that laps at dams and levees, animals and insects fleeing the floodwaters. The poet reckons with man's desire to hem in such wildness, to keep it in its place; yet ultimately, we learn, freedom comes only in the letting go.

-Andrew K. Clark, author, Where Dark Things Rise

The poems in Foxy Love are deeply, intelligently aware of time, how short it is, how little of it we have left, and how much of it we wasted on our journey to this quintessentially disappointing American moment. The light is low and soft and filtered through the trees still standing. Rivers overflow their grassy banks. We have done this to ourselves in a thousand reprehensible ways, revving engines and unfurling flags. But somewhere a man stops his car to carry a box turtle from one side of the road to another, and somewhere else the haze clears long enough to reveal the blue beneath the clouds. We may not be able to avoid entirely what we've conjured into being, but we can weave our days through with protective spells and charms. Which do work sometimes, and in mysterious ways, like a poem or a tree coming into bud. "Whoever buys this house after we leave it will cut the trees back," according to one of the pieces in this lovely collection, and I don't doubt it, but for now the house and the trees are ours and we must love while we still have time.

-Jennifer A. Sutherland, author, House of Myth and Necessity