|
Poetry is for our secrets, for the things we're not sorry for, for the vulnerabilities that are not confessions or admissions but proclamations, songs, joyful rememberings. Such is the poetry of Alexis Rhone Fancher's BRAZEN. The girls and women who emerge in these poems are unashamed and unabashed. They remind me why I need poetry. Tough and tender at once, this lucid and lyric collection flashes brightly in the gritty, neon night of memory. It splits open the heart and keeps splitting.
—Jenn Givhan, author, Belly To The Brutal
Throughout BRAZEN, as with previous work, Alexis Rhone Fancher seamlessly reconfigures Romanticism, Confessionalism, glam, noir, punk, and the history of power dynamics, navigating that wondrous line between sensuality and decadence, ecstasy and hedonism, epicureanism and porn. Unabashedly visceral, these poems also point to ineluctable truths, reflecting how the erotic impulse inspires, propels, adrenalizes, and occasionally consumes us. As the poet writes, "[The] body is a minefield; it is also 'liability' and 'albatross.'" Weaving images and narratives alternately irresistible and disturbing, and often both, Fancher reminds us that while desire is an enthralling guide, it can be an exacting master.
—John Amen, editor of Pedestal Magazine/author of Illusion of an Overwhelm
For Alexis Rhone Fancher, an accomplished photographer, the eye is a sexual organ, the camera an implement of desire. Intense sensuality becomes a kind of prayer, as well as a way of exposing our scars, of revealing and healing: "When I ask him which part of me he loves best,/ J. answers: What's missing,// tonguing the place where my nipple had been." In LA, where Fancher lives, Hollywood celebrities are like coyotes on the prowl, snatching hungry young artists forced to make a living performing phone sex. A recurring character in these poems is a nameless "famous poet" a scheming, over-sexed, over-seventy man who holds a young female poet in thrall: he made her think/ she invented lust,/ counted on her discretion,/ taught her to be loyal as a dove. The hard edges of Fancher's subjects sometimes overwhelm the reader, but the poems are rendered in such charged, packed language, rich with metaphor, textured with quick turns from the erotic to the satiric to the tragic that we can't take our eyes off what she shows us, even when it burns into our memories. The poet sees a handsome young man and says "If he were mine,/ I'd ride him like a stolen bicycle."
—Michael Simms, Editor, Vox Populi, author, Bicycles of the Gods
|
