Fox Haunts
Celebrated for her performance poetry, Penn Kemp broaches new territory in Fox Haunts. In poems drawn from nature and literature, she reveals a gift for deft adaptation. Sporting her familiar spirit of play while drawing on wide background reading, she invites you to thoroughly explore the fascinating character of a specific urban creature, the Fox. Centred in mythology, these engaged and engaging poems offer a compendium of lore and look both outward to the world and inward to the imaginal realm.
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Reviews of this Book
These leaping lyrical loops of poems are spare in execution and long on the hope contained in haunting. They feature Fox, both he and she, as the ultimate interstitial, the ancient interloper on the many estrangements of modernity. Blending science and myth with the ecstasy of attention, these “willingly lithe” poems employ Fox’s insouciant ambivalence to wreak shenanigans on the edges of our cities and our minds.
– Tanis MacDonald, author of Out of Line: Daring to Be an Artist Outside the Big City
Penn Kemp’s excellent Fox Haunts are as elusive and visionary and populous as poems or dreams can be – and as persistently wild.
– Sharon Thesen, author of The Receiver
Fox Haunts gambols with glimmering flashes of foxfire energy through urban back yards, into myth, archetype, literature, and the human psyche; yet in the end the book is a bow to real foxes who cannot be circumscribed by human projection. Kemp’s stunning wordplay has the capacity to awaken, inspire, and “rewild” us. This book is proof on the pulses that poetry itself is a fox-like mode of being and expression. I am totally enchanted with Fox Haunts.
– Susan McCaslin, author of Into the Mystic: Poems New and Selected
