In 1981 Skip Fox completed his PhD from Bowling Green State University and came to Louisiana to teach at what is now the University of the Louisiana, Lafayette. He brought with him a bottomless appetite for contemporary poetry, inspired by the Donald Allen anthology The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, and, once here, came to love and immerse himself in the far-from-Ohio culture of south Louisiana. Here he worked beside another prolific poet who would become a dear friend of Lavender Ink, Marthe Reed.

I discovered Skip’s work while compiling the anthology I edited for University of Alabama Press’s Modern and Contemporary Poetics series in 2002, Another South: Experimental Writing in the South. While I had prided myself, while working on this collection, in searching out a good sampling of the experimental work that was happening at that time in the South US, I had not found Skip, working a mere 90 miles away in Lafayette; he rather found me. I was frankly shocked to see work of the caliber he sent me coming out of bayou country, and he and I quickly became correspondents and friends. I selected a good sampling of his work for the anthology, and ten years later, when I was at UNO Press, we released his Sheer Indefinite: Selected Poems, 1991-2011, which includes work from the many books he published along the way with such presses as Potes and Poets, Bloody Twin, ahadada, and BlazeVox.

Skip is now Emeritus at ULL and living in his longtime rural retreat in Sunset, LA, outside Lafayette. He recently (as of February 2026) suffered a stroke which left him, temporarily, aphasic. Ever the experimenter and always at the service of his art, he wrote into this aphasia rather than lamenting its onset. The result is a lyric triumph, Late Day, and a new novel, Pugs, a neo-picaresque, magical realist joy ride through southern Louisiana and sublimities of human consciousness. These are added to our previous offering of Wired to Zone, which takes the conventions of the detective novel to surreal new heights.

Through May 1, 2026, if you order two or more of Skip’s titles, use coupon code foxtitles for a 40% discount.

Here, to wet your whistle, a poem from Late Day:

The stage was nearly set

eyeballs out, teeth-sharpened, sphincter providing a dusty-theater
lighting, the prop-boy’s navel filled with lint, molecules renouncing
their previously assigned arrangements, as curtains rise like the sun over
tenement grime beneath swollen skies, the insouciance of burnt cabbage,
rotting meat to mind. Why a broken leg? Why not the self-evagination
of every creature as they crash the gates? Why not let rot the boards
and loose the staff, find honest job as thief or whore? Where were such
lines ever cast, what context ever so pure? Could he delineate the colors
of the pallete from a harbor bay in early summer light? What might such
a study yield? Sheen of wave, dance of distant lights, orbs catching
fire, language again flowing through golden apparitions as sunlight
overtops the world, cars glide into the canted curve, making what-
soever they might out of whatever’s left as He-Who-Waits-for-
the-Sun-to-Rise pauses before the dark comedies of another day