Brazen

by Alexis Rhone Fancher

A New Collection from award winning poet Alexis Rhone Fancher. For Alexis Rhone Fancher fans, the wait is over. Admit it! You've been lusting after something naughty to liven up your life. Once again, Alexis delivers. Brazen showcases her best work since Erotic , and includes all the "Famous Poet Behaving Badly" poems, together in one volume for the first time. Do it! Give in to your Brazen nature … "Poetry is for our secrets, for the things we're not sorry for, for the vulnerabilities that are not confessions or admissions but proclamations, songs, joyful rememberings. Such is the poetry of Alexis Rhone Fancher's Brazen . The girls and women who emerge in these poems are unashamed and unabashed. They remind me why I need poetry. Tough and tender at once, this lucid and lyric collection flashes brightly in the gritty, neon night of memory. It splits open the heart and keeps splitting."--Jenn Givhan, author of Belly To The Brutal "Throughout Brazen , as with previous work, Alexis Rhone Fancher seamlessly reconfigures Romanticism, Confessionalism, glam, noir, punk, and the history of power dynamics, navigating that wondrous line between sensuality and decadence, ecstasy and hedonism, epicureanism and porn. Unabashedly visceral, these poems also point to ineluctable truths, reflecting how the erotic impulse inspires, propels, adrenalizes, and occasionally consumes us. As the poet writes, "[The] body is a minefield; it is also 'liability' and 'albatross.'" Weaving images and narratives alternately irresistible and disturbing, and often both, Fancher reminds us that while desire is an enthralling guide, it can be an exacting master."--John Amen, editor of Pedestal Magazine/author of Illusion of an Overwhelm "For Alexis Rhone Fancher, an accomplished photographer, the eye is a sexual organ, the camera an implement of desire. Intense sensuality becomes a kind of prayer, as well as a way of exposing our scars, of revealing and 'When I ask him which part of me he loves best,/ J. What's missing,// tonguing the place where my nipple had been.' In LA, where Fancher lives, Hollywood celebrities are like coyotes on the prowl, snatching hungry young artists forced to make a living performing phone sex. A recurring character in these poems is a nameless 'famous poet' a scheming, over-sexed, over-seventy man who holds a young female poet in he made her think/ she invented lust,/ counted on her discretion,/ taught her to be loyal as a dove. The hard edges of Fancher's subjects sometimes overwhelm the reader, but the poems are rendered in such charged, packed language, rich with metaphor, textured with quick turns from the erotic to the satiric to the tragic that we can't take our eyes off what she shows us, even when it burns into our memories. The poet sees a handsome young man and says 'If he were mine,/ I'd ride him like a stolen bicycle.'"----Michael Simms, Editor, Vox Populi, author of Bicycles of the Gods Poetry. Women's Studies.

108 pages, Paperback

Published March 7, 2023

About the author

Alexis Rhone Fancher’s poem, “when I turned fourteen, my mother’s sister took me to lunch and said:” was chosen by Edward Hirsch for inclusion in The Best American Poetry of 2016. Her poetry has been published in over thirty anthologies and chapbooks, both in the U.S. and abroad, and her photographs have been published worldwide.

Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly, where she also publishes "The Poet’s Eye," a monthly photo essay about Los Angeles. Since 2013, Alexis has been nominated for eleven Pushcart Prizes, one Best Short Fiction award, and four Best of the Net awards. She and her husband live and collaborate in a loft/studio space in downtown Los Angeles. They have a spectacular view.

Reviews

[Ace Boggess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alexis Rhone Fancher writes the most brutally honest poetry out there. It's equally erotic and confessional, depicting the life (especially the sex life) of the poems' narrators in glory and debasement, passion and compulsion. All the good and all the bad merge into a poetic that is entirely Fancher's. No one else comes close. This book also has the added benefit of sharing some of Fancher's unique photography, which humanizes the world her poems inhabit. These are not erotic photos, but everyday scenes caught with an artist's careful eye. This a wonderful book. Every book Fancher writes is better than the last. Buy this one.