Delta Blues (Press Release) (181 KB)

Available soon: Delta Blues by Skip Fox

Delta Blues is the fourth in a series of texts tentatively titled Dream of a Book. It was preceded by What Of (Potes & Poets), At That (Ahadada Books) and For To (BlazeVox). Reprising his role as entomologist, Skip Fox presents passages sprawling and pinned in a shadow box of observations and odd lots.

Patrick James Dunagan writes that Fox “holds forth in the tradition of Stein and Williams with fluid experimental passages that hang on the page in a successful bopping between prose and poetry . . . alongside the pleasure and beauty to be found is also the grotesque and absurd.”.

Writes Fox in Delta Blues —

age is telling a long joke, with some apparent joy, early at a party, not all the guests have yet arrived, a first drink freshly in your hand, he's an interesting stranger in no hurry, pausing for laughs, comments, not prolonging the punch line but forgiving it its necessities, standing and laughing and listening, slowly he reaches the part about pest Pacific blue and the sound of sails at sunset, how their color changes in the changing light, shades of white in encroaching darkness, pewter, you are still young, anything can happen, yet is a word you can still use as a soft wedge, argumentation may again be filled with joy, now for witness of sheer mind's leaping, but his words have slowed, slightly, and his head almost turns, then with a light shift in his eye, oh yes, the abyss, I almost forgot

Currently serving what appears to be a life sentence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Skip Fox has worked in woods, warehouses, shake and shingle mills, lumber yards, ketchup & catfood factories, mental hospitals, and so on.