How Shadows are Bundled is an extraordinarily rich collection of poems, many of which explore what C. G. Jung referred to as the 'shadow,' that dark, usually hidden part of each of us individually, and perhaps the troubled vortex of most group identities as well. W. H. Auden, as a poet of conscience aware of the shadow, once said that he reads a poem in two ways, first as a verbal object to be understood, and second as an expression of the kind of person the poet is. In How Shadows are Bundled the verbal objects have a thrilling clarity to them, carrying the reader along into rich, unexplored, and expansive realms and feelings. "There are few generalities here; the poems are alive with detail. They range from poems about politics, cancer, family travails, and spiritual struggles to hurricanes, asteroids, aging, and the work of other writers and filmmakers. The poems reveal the person who created them to be someone with a hard eye and a deep kindness, someone who refuses to turn away from trouble and pain, an unflinching witness who sees the truth but never runs from delight when she finds it."--V. B. Price, lecturer emeritus, University of New Mexico's University honors program, and editor of the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry series

How Shadows Are Bundled (Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Valley-Fox, Anne

Poetry

University of New Mexico Press

Poetry. California Interest. 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

Nightfall

Red Mountain Press

Frontier Stories: A New Mexico Federal Writers' Project Book

Biographies & Memoirs

Lacy, Ann

Historical

Sunstone Press

. . . Where is the point of no return?No one sees it coming orcan tell you when.When love reaches a point of no return, how does one respond to a fractured landscape and its tumbling uncertainties? In this poetic cycle, respected New Mexico writer Anne Valley-Fox looks for clues to the meaning of intimacy and the provenance of corruption. ("What made you blind? Why did you woo oblivion?") In language by turns raucous, wry, tender and tough, these incisive narratives find voice in the mythology of the ordinary. The poems are sure, masterful, but not mere expositions of craft--they are made of passion and a willingness to risk. Her work resonates with a depth of metaphor that startles, delights and often exposes the raw facts of marriage as it actually lives. Theodore Roethke said that the poet's job is to lament & to praise--as this collection of poems surely reveals."Both sensual and spiritual, [these poems] know of joy and grief, of loss and redemption, of the mystery that hovers always beyond our grasp. With unforced artistry and an appealing clarity of style they present a moving tableau of the transitory fragments that make up a life; they are poems to fill the day with new awareness"--R. W. French

Point of No Return: Poems

La Alameda Press

Literary Nonfiction. THE HOUSEHOLD MUSE, titled after a collection of piano pieces by Darius Milhaud, is a correspondence between two writers who live together. These short essays, written back and forth over the course of a year, are concerned with "whatever was closest on any particular day, although what was closest might be long ago or far away:" peach saplings, former loves, political mayhem, mice in the compost, refugees, a dying friend, a melodeon, a marsh hawk by the railroad tracks. The writers--a California poet drawn into the San Francisco poetry scene in the 1970s and a New Yorker who fled university life for New Mexico during the same era--met in the state's Artists in the Schools program and coupled up many years and several divorces later. In "My Whatever," Tom Ireland writes, "If you still have it, please destroy the letter I wrote to you before we got together...something along the lines of, 'I want to possess you and be possessed by you.' I was out of my mind with desire, whereas now, I just love you." Anne Valley-Fox replies in "Not Married," "Maybe I don't trust myself as one half of a couple; maybe I don't trust husbands; maybe you and I relish the renegade feeling of living on the other side of the matrimonial tracks. We could change our minds tomorrow. For today, I choose to be with you, I do." The collection, completed a few months before the coronavirus outbreak, ends with the birth of a grandson, an event that invites the two to consider the time they have left, however short or long, and how to make the most of it. "So yes," she writes, "let's bet our lives on human kindness and microbe-eating earthworms, and love each other like there's no tomorrow."

The Household Muse

Ireland, Tom

Essays & Correspondence

Tres Chicas Books

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Books by Valley-Fox, Anne