First Flag

Sarah Fox co-imagines the Center for Visionary Poetics, serves as a doula, and is a teacher of poetry and creative writing. She contributes posts on feminism, mysticism, astrology, and poetics to the blog Montevidayo and has won grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board, among others. Coffee House Press published her debut collection, Because Why, in 2006.

"[Fox] uses collage, footnotes and fragmentation to create poly-vocal works with both visual and textual elements... These well-wrought images showcase Fox's skill with rendering image -- a fundamental of poetry that she doesn't subvert."--Star Tribune "The First Flag feels somehow so radical to me that I have difficulty finding language to describe it." --Spoonriver "The First Flag is an extremely complex and ambitious book, one that cuts through the dead-serious "playfulness" and studied poses of much other experimental poetry. It is a book fashioned from the quick and the dead, the raw and the cooked. In it, Sarah Fox has created something profoundly daring, unique, unsettling, and beautiful."--Tarpaulin Sky Press "An LJ "poet to watch," Fox returns in a pastiche of form, intelligence, experience, and imagination with verse and essays of experimental design... Fox has a gift for grit, and she's not afraid to use it."--Library Journal "I read a ton of fantastic books, thanks to this review column. But still, it's rare that a book gets me so excited that my notes fill up pages and pages, and I simply can't wait to start reviewing ... The First Flag did that for me."--Hazel & Wren "It has been a long time since I have been so excited about a book of poems the way I am for Sarah Fox's The First Flag. The poems are some of the most human-animal poems I have read, disarming and beautiful, scary because they are about us, honest and rough, intelligent and real."--Tin House blog "The First Flag is a mystic alimentary, blood, bone, and pearl poetics--utterly engaging in its seductive conversational tone. But it's an odd conversation as Fox periodically cries her brains out in ecstasy, disbelief, grief. It's a luminescent accomplishment, lush with decay, exploding with impossible meldings of stench and shimmer. By way of a powerful natal femininity she claws back the oral threads of her got-away story. I wanted to be right there when her words crowned. Her sentences deliver. It's not just that her language is a trip; she is really saying something you find you want to hear all the way down. And the footnotes are delightful." --Nor Hall "Anyone interested in visionary poetics and/or documentary poetics and/or radical feminist phenomenology should give this book a read." --The Volta Blog "The masterpiece of this extraordinary collection is a hexagonal 36 poem cycle, 'Comma'. Sarah Fox envisions herself as a separation daemon in a birth theater. By exorcising the hordes and weevil casts of her uteral spectres and conceiving of the 'family romance' as mantic veins to be pumped, she achieves the denouement of becoming fully (not just physically) born. Birth as apocalyptic breakdown; the work? Imaginal punctuality."--Clayton Eshleman "Attention, human-born: 'THE WAR-TO-ETERNITY BLOWS LIKE BELUGA THROUGH MAN-HOLES ON 'THE BODY OF MOM." So announces Sarah Fox's new grimoire-cum-war-manual, The First Flag. This book is not fearless, but, like Notley's Alette, it pushes through fear as it pushes through membranes of harm, violence, toxicity, ill-inheritance, silence and suppression to retrieve a kind of knowledge from the opposite side. Fox's poetry is a disarming, potent striving after some as-yet-unparaphrasable element which might, eventually, be healing. So necessary is this battle-passage for the liberation of our desiccated moment that our new flag must bear a line of Fox's poetry: 'FUCK THE PATROLMAN AT THE BORDER. At any border, within or without.' --Joyelle McSweeney "[Fox's poem 'COMMA'] marks the arrival of a strong new voice for our continuing poetry project."--Jacket2 "Sarah Fox's work is a force resisting a dysfunctional and still anti-woman medical industry."--Drunken Boat

• CONTENTSPreface Difficulty at the Beginning ……7One: Object Relations Fata Morgana ……14Mathematics in Everyday Life ……15The Clinging, Fire ……17The Joyous, Lake ……19Before Completion ……22The Family (The Clan) ……24Daughter Object ……26Transitional Object ……28Muse Object ……31Wife Object ……33Two: Doctrine of Signatures Dispersion [Dissolution] ……35My Helmet: A Sonnet ……38The Marrying Maiden ……39Moms vs. Dads ……42After Completion ……43My Antler ……46The Arousing (Shock, Thunder) ……49My Sword Loves Me ……52Biting Through / {tl;dr} ……53Three: COM(M)A ……55 (i) I Slid Out of My Mother's Body ……55Exogeny ……55Eros, Indiscriminate ……55Coma ……56Doll Box ……56A Woman Waits for Me ……56Brain Letter ……57Pawn ……57Stirring Interior ……57Satellite ……58(ii)Dr. Cronus ……58Disease ……58Born in Prison ……59Quarantine ……59I Don't Want ……60Side Effects ……60Dying of Darkness ……61Satchidananda ……61(iii)Merge ……62Raccoon ……62Poetry as Magic ……63Transference ……63Bondage ……63Centrifuge ……64The Other Husband ……64Couch ……65Ambassador ……65Kairos ……66Scream ……66(iv)The More Cloudy Places ……67Poison Path ……67Keeping it Real ……67Skull Collector ……68Kula ……68Sacrifice ……69Inside the Deer ……69Four: The TowerA Concept of Zero ……70[Essay on My Daughter] ……74Essay on My Tower ……75Essay on My Tower (2) ……76Essay on My Memory ……79 Essay on My Father ……83Essay on Increase ……85Five: The CaldronNaked ……86Owl ……94Preponderance of the Small ……96Writ on Water ……101Anthem ……102 I'd Rather Be Here ……107The First Flag (?)……109Postnatural ……110