The Fastening

Review\n"The Next Monsters is an accomplished volume, one that’s as carefully crafted as it is culturally astute. Her new collection is a wonderful addition to an already thought-provoking body of work."—Colorado Review, on The Next Monsters\n"Julie Doxsee's Objects for a Fog Death can be seen as the intensive attempt to evoke barely-rendered emotions into words—even to invent new feelings outright."—Bookslut on Objects for a Fog Death\n"Doxsee’s poems are shattered mirrors; they are fractured, jagged. If you stare at them long enough, you’ll uncover patterns in the chaos, hints of a larger image that was perhaps banished to a new and frightening dimension when the mirror was broken."—Heavy Feather Review, on The Next Monsters\n"That Doxsee’s poems are able to simultaneously resist the order of the senses and achieve a crystalline-like order on the page is one of the major accomplishments of this book. Nearly all of these poems are written in packed, terse couplets where each line is taut as a wire. Yet, Doxsee’s line and stanza breaks maximize the tension and energy of her language, urging us into her music, pushing us over an edge we didn’t even know was there."—The Volta on Objects for a Fog Death\nThe fifth book of poetry by a true poet's poet with a unique mastery of language and experimentation.
In Julie Doxsee’s The Fastening, the permanent imprints of love, childhood, death, and pleasure are elongated, handled delicately, celebrated, puzzled over, all while underpinned by hauntingly vicious origins. Landscapes in the book shift and jolt, melt into snowman slush or gash the flesh with matter-of-fact craters, thorns, rope burns, and rocks.\nThe poet wants to scrub the sharp peaks with steel wool but recognizes how millions of these violence-borne imprints have ganged up to keep her alive. In The Fastening, bodies are soft sketches that could detonate at the pop of a flashbulb, diffuse into a cloud of vapor, or escape into a small recess with just enough space to breathe.