Kate Fox
The Company Misery Loves
by Kate Fox
ISBN: 9781962405058 $16.00
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kate Fox’s work has appeared in the Great River Review, New Ohio Review, Green Mountains Review, Kenyon Review, Valparaiso Review, Pleiades, and West Branch. She has also authored two poetry chapbooks: The Lazarus Method, chosen for the Wick Poetry Series and published by Kent State University Press, and Walking Off the Map, published by Seven Kitchens Press in Cincinnati. She was an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist’s Grant recipient, and her poem, “The Lost Baby Poem” earned second place in Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Award competition. She lives in Athens with poet and scholar Bob DeMott, and their two English setters, mild-mannered Katie, and ill-mannered Patch.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In his Collected Works, the surrealist poet Paul Eluard writes, “There is another world, but it is in this one.” The poems in this collection set out to examine what it means to exist in those distinct but inseparable worlds—worlds that can cause both misery and joy for those who are time-bound, but can also grant infinite insight and wisdom. All the voices and stories gathered here intertwine and co-exist, revealing, as poet Irene Kinney writes, “…this unknown buried in the known.”
ADVANCE PRAISE
Review by Rose Smith in New Ohio Review
QUOTES:
The hard-earned wisdom of The Company Misery Loves leaves any reader with a heart in love again with language, joyful to be in the presence of poetry at this level of intelligence and craft. Fox offers this poultice: “to tear down is the hardest and best/beginning,” showing us that “the entire sequence/of a season comes to rest in this blossom.” This poetry is flawless. Devastatingly beautiful.
––Jane Ann Fuller, author of Half-Life (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2021)
Kate Fox brings intelligence, compassion, and humor to bear on the rural towns of her childhood, the seductions of landscape, “the keel and waver of a cardinal, / the bruised flutter in the air,” the rhythm and blues that sway her between past and present, and the remarkable women who lend her their voices—Mary Shelley, Kathleen Scott (widow of the polar explorer)— and who, like the poet, “knew not to flinch.” With precise diction and clarity, with a sure command of her craft, Fox demonstrates in poem after poem how “one solitary tongue… / sings the severed world whole.”
––Michael Waters, author of Sinnerman (Etruscan Press, 2023)
This taut collection depicts a world of self-resurrecting beings whose company is both miserable and exquisite—whose daily life is based on an amalgam of time and eternity. According to the poet, our relationship with this world is often adversarial, always fatal. However, in poem after poem, Fox reveals the strength and joy in learning “to bear the weight of someone else’s body on our own.”
––Roy Bentley, author of Swallow (Pine Row Press, 2024)
Kate Fox’s poems wind past wheatfields and roadside memorials, mourning phantom limbs and lovers, lost children and polar explorers, and asking “What do we owe the dead?” The Company Misery Loves is elegiac in the most ancient and very best sense of the word, a collection imbued with the music of “birdsong and jasmine bloom, F-chord/and car exhaust” and all the “songs that survive on breath alone.”
––Shelley Puhak, author of Harbinger (National Poetry Series Award, 2022)
