Late Day

Description

Skip Fox

Late Day

ISBN 978-1-956921-62-5
170 pages: $19.95
October, 2025

Skip Fox’s new collection of poems, Late Day, is haunted by endings: his father’s death, his own approaching end, and, especially, the projected end of the human species in Earth’s sixth major extinction. In the volume’s forty-two pieces—whose subjects range from the nature of self, words, Yahweh, nothingness, appositives, prepositions, dreams, expression, and the quotidian—extinction of species appears like a Wagnernian leitmotif or a common thread. The poetry is experimental, and many pieces are in demanding spatial forms, perhaps challenging the reader’s notion of the arbitrary. At first glance, perhaps, dark, the work is leavened with humor, mind’s play, and the belief that even as we approach our conclusion we can still pay attention to spirit’s essentials, have a deeper appreciation of nature and beauty, and discover a profound sense of meaning in this late historical stage.

Praise for Skip Fox and Late Day

With wired to zone Skip Fox has crossed tech-noir with bio-punk to create something maddened and strange and utterly new, a kind of blue acid noir licking the flaps of its own pockets and not to be denied. A gorgeous and lurching dizziness of a novel.
—Brian Evenson

Welcome to the nuance parade of corporate genetic leftovers where “freaked and fractured thinking” reigns supreme. With “a pathos past all measure” amusing the muses is as primary to Skip Fox as smoking or breathing. Inside his “chemical stew” we’re always almost nearly there and he arrives just in time, lurking at the threshold, leading us while being led.
—Micah Ballard

Praise writing that tends exuberantly to its composition, enriched by long study and practice, language all generative actuality; characters that exist through act, rather than to represent actors; story not as plot but match with the Deep Blue of fatal logic; a hero stretched from Apuleius to Chandler, as well as two distressed demoiselles: one reincarnates Phoebe Zeitgeist, the other blends Cloned Dolly and Marilyn Monroe. Somebody is threatening zero, nothing, loss of neutrality, the ultimate MacGuffin. Passion of the digital. Them versus whatever we think we are. Praise this book by reading it. You will find it novel.
—Brian Richards