Ahadada Books (Toronto & Tokyo) is pleased to announce the release of Skip Fox's Delta Blues. 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.

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, any-
thing 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

Skip Fox is currently serving what appears to be a life sentence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where he lives on three acres with a log cabin and a pond in one of the poorest parishes in the state. Fox writes poetry, prose, and short fictions as well as reviews.

He dates his birth from his first reading of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry, 1945-1960. He also has three chapbooks, one bibliography (on Creeley, Dorn, and Duncan), and years on MLA Bibliography and Bulletin of Bibliography. In addition to Ahadada's At That, his book, What Of, is available from Potes & Poets Press.

He graduated from Bowling Green State. He has worked in woods (Pacific Northwest), warehouses (San Francisco), shake and shingle mills (Beaver, WA), lumber yards, ketchup & catfood factories, Chrysler, mental hospitals (Ohio, seven years), and so on.

His work is included in Another South: Experimental Writing in the South (U of Alabama). He has been published by such little magazines as Hambone, o.blek, Talisman, and Exquisite Corpse.

This title is available now from Small Press Distribution, in better bookstores and is available direct from the publisher. Please feel free to contact us should you have any questions.

What People Are Saying About Delta Blues:

“That most of these untellable stories are not told because they have not happened, and cannot happen, is something I find best told by Skip Fox, in his new book Delta Blues.”
          —Susan M. Schultz

“no other hurricane prose
can match the gnash of the storm Skip
Fox has unleashed
this super-hyper-organic-destructo-twister of pure
Incandescent
    Blazin'
       Brilliance!!!—

dissolving like battery acid
the flesh of all
we think know.”
          —Mark Spitzer

“As I consider Fox's poem, I realize why [Mark] Young [author of Lunch Poems] and Fox are achieving some truly wonderful poems: both possess the mental suppleness required to address complexities without being overwhelmed, before proceeding forward to write with admirable deftness.”
          —Eileen Tabios