Richard Fox
otherwise you well? a selection of Richard Fox’s poems written over 10 years, confronts the way predatory capitalism and its digital culture is cauterising humanity and nature. With taut momentum and often fierce humour, these poems describe the 21st-century predicament in a way that is both graphic and austere. In between, in a gentler style, are lyric poems of painful insight. And in between those, a very South African road trip.
*
Without any of the predictable doomsday warnings or linear unfolding, there is a frenetic energy moving through [this poem] which mirrors so well the way our overstimulated brains scamper in multiple directions in an attempt to make sense of these turbulent times […] The visual and visceral assaults are relentless to the point of that very feeling untethered that this poem ‘embodies’.
– Malika Ndlovu, judge of New Coin Poetry Prize 2021
on Fox’s poem “Animal Mind is Tripping”
