ANN VALLEY-FOX
Anne Valley-Fox was born in Paterson, New Jersey, raised in Santa Monica, California, and schooled at the University of California, Berkeley, during the Free Speech Movement. Her poetry collections are How Shadows Are Bundled, POINT OF NO RETURN, Fish Drum 15, and Sending the Body Out. Her work has been anthologized in Generations: A Centenary of American Poets (1919-2019), Nuova antologia di poesia americana, POEM: Poets on (an) Exchange Mission, Baby Beat Generation, and In Company: An Anthology of New Mexico Poets after 1960. Her prose publications include Your Mythic Journey (with Sam Keen) and five oral-history collections from the New Deal’s New Mexico Federal Writers’ Project (coeditor, Ann Lacy). In 2016 she received a William Matthews Poetry Prize from the Asheville Poetry Review. A life-long practitioner of the barefoot sports, swimming and hatha yoga, she lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Author City: SANTA FE, NM USA
Nightfall
NIGHTFALL is a collection of vivid poems from an American poet in her seventh decade.
Anne Valley-Fox sets out to investigate personal issues of aging, loss, and regeneration of spirit. Introspective poems are matched with intense evocations of the external world’s beauty and cruelty.
These are intimate meditations: Valley-Fox invites the reader to lean in close as she “sorts through the wreckage,” “bows to the morning,” waits for a song “on the wave of your next breath.” A number of poems evoke the dazzling work of other writers, as if to say: here’s how language, deeply imagined, sets us free.
Valley-Fox’s signature voice is tough and tender, sensuous and exacting. This collection is lively with questions, brave explorations of human character and behavior. “Will paralysis strike, with it’s stark intent to humiliate / as the odd crisis occurs?” “Might suicide be a pilgrimage towards the light?” “Have you loved enough?”
Self and world, body and earth, are fused through juxtaposition. Beauty’s Beast pairs with Fukushima, Sandy Hook with “a few bad apples,” wild fires with Lady Godiva, Harvey Milk with the Second Amendment, Ebola virus with tenderness.
“Poet Anne Valley-Fox has a beautiful, wide gaze—viewing what she sees with openness, empathy: out the back door of her home, a pueblo neighborhood, pop-up dreams, memories, incidents of travel, smoke, the animal warmth of others—all equally seen—’words for the good.’ And her self surprises her—’her game is to do as she pleases’—which pleases us, her readers. ‘I’m innocent, damn it! Forgive me.'”—Joanne Kyger
