Written over an eight-year period, the poems in State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies chronicle the death of Alexis Rhone Fancher’s only child, Joshua Dorian Rhone, at the age of 26, and its aftermath of devastation, grief, and reflection. Because she was a divorced parent since her son was three, the bond between mother and child was particularly strong, making Joshua’s early death especially wrenching. But Fancher, an award-winning poet known for her frank, image-filled poetry, has created a work of hope, joy, and lasting beauty—which poet Jack Grapes calls “a magnificent testament to the resilience of the human spirit”—where she indeed finds solace and a “state of grace.” Poet Cynthia Atkins calls Fancher’s collection of elegies “the ultimate tribute to her beloved son.” “Fancher’s heart is large, refuses to shut down to sorrow and loss, but instead, allows her brave and resilient voice to shine the light, to move us all forward into a state of grace.” Two of the poems in the chapbook have been nominated for the 2015 Best of the Net Anthology: “The Competition” (KYSO Flash) and “when her son is dead seven years” (Blotterature). Since 2013, Fancher’s work has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and four Best of the Net awards. She is also the author of How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen: and other heart-stab poems (Sybaritic Press, 2014). Her poems have been published in numerous literary journals and magazines, as well as in 25 American and international anthologies, and her photographs have been published worldwide. Fancher is photography editor of Fine Linen, and poetry editor of Cultural Weekly, where she also publishes The Poet’s Eye, a monthly photo essay about her ongoing love affair with Los Angeles. She lives in downtown L.A. with her husband and co-creator James Fancher in their eighth-floor loft/studio.

State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies

Literature & Fiction

Fancher, Alexis Rhone

Poetry

KYSO Flash

How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen: and other heart-stab poems

Sybaritic Press

Poetry. California Interest. Alexis Rhone Fancher tears the plain brown wrapper off erotica. She refuses to play safe, strips away pretense, intent on exposing the fragility, angst and longing lurking just below the sexual surface. EROTIC features poems and flash never before seen in any collection, as well as gems from Rhone Fancher's first two erotic offerings, How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen & other heart stab poems (2014) and Enter Here (2017). It includes the infamous "Sister Poems," all together for the first time. With her "take no prisoners" attitude, Rhone Fancher spares no one, least of all herself. As she's quoted in The Fem: "I write about women like me, women who own their sexuality and take responsibility for their choices. It may seem I'm writing about sex, but really, I'm writing about power. Who has it. How to get it. How to wield it. How to keep it." Come along with the author as she careens through her checkered past. Enjoy her misadventures. Cop a feel. Have a laugh. But reader beware: Alexis Rhone Fancher's wry confessional may do more than lubricate your libido. It just might steal your heart.

Erotic: New & Selected

NYQ Books

A New Collection from award winning poet Alexis Rhone Fancher. 
For Alexis Rhone Fancher fans, the wait is over. Admit it! You've been lusting after something naughty to liven up your life. Once again, Alexis delivers. Brazen showcases her best work since Erotic, and includes all the "Famous Poet Behaving Badly" poems, together in one volume for the first time. 
Do it! Give in to your Brazen nature … 
"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 of 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 of Bicycles of the Gods 
Poetry. Women's Studies.

Brazen

Santa Barbara Literary Journal: Volume 6: Saturn's Return

Willis, Paul

Hoag, Christina

Talley, Max DeVoe

Webb, Silver

Bern, Dan

Tree, Ed

Literary

Independently published

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