REVOIR GETTING STRONG REVIEWS!

REVOIR, BY HUGH FOX GARNERING GREAT REVIEWS. If you like fine literature, read the following reviews and then, read the book!


That most books written today are whittled down to a single theme or idea is not uncommon, and this includes many books of serious literature. REVOIR falls into the category of serious literature. Yet rather than reducing, it’s a book so filled with heart that it seems to expand, page after page. Each of the 25 stories Fox presents is about family, extended family, displaced family, the longing for family. What is, and what is gone. And behind the humor and hubris is a heart reaching to take in everything: be it people, food, drink, nature, the unknown. Fox gives us the great big candy store in the sky. Between comic turns the stories are tender, and the author is saying that in order to survive this world, and for the world to survive us, everything has got to meld. And sooner rather than later. He spreads this through the book like smooth butter, encouraging us to lick the pages, taste the fatty sweetness before the bindings dry up. In the title story Revoir, Poet Joey and his current wife have a reunion in Phoenix with a former wife Joey now sees as being “too chocolatey-trufflish-pecan cheese cake-ish…” yet he can’t help but love and lust after her, as in the old days. The old days hang shroud-like over the book but never bury it. There is too much to love about the present to let the past take over; and linear time swims and swirls. In Das Heldenleben / The Hero’s Life an elderly man phones a woman he once loved but had ditched fifty years earlier, and talks her into meeting him for coffee. They’d planned on marrying, once, those two young devout Catholics, until she spilled her guts about having sex with another guy, during a summer work stint at the Cape. Remembering the terrible night she confessed, he now regrets his reaction, and that he left her, thinking of himself as “Idiotic him, Mr. Daily Communion, the body and blood of Christ… sex only for one thing, procreation, if you had fun that was only incidental… it was the deepest, darkest sin…” His gorgeous lost love who has become an old woman with piled up white hair, glasses and a cane. In a breathless effort to charge backward, he imagines kidnapping her, taking her to remote romantic places. And like the Catholicism that once kept him chained, he’s chained again, but of his own doing. So he lets her go a second time. REVOIR never figures anything out because it doesn’t set itself to that task. Fox knows this from the first page. The way he knows the mystery will forever remain the mystery. He rails a bit, here and there, then he acquiesces.


—Susan Tepper (The review by Susan Tepper has been accepted by Len Fulton for SMALL PRESS REVIEW!!!)

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE

James Cox. MIDWEST REVIEW

“Stories need inspiration and Hugh Fox has a lot of inspiration to draw from. “Revoir” is a collection of short stories from this man as he discusses many subjects and gives readers a fine glimpse into his mind through fiction. The stories wide and varies, he discusses many subjects while entertaining the reader, making “Revoir” a read to be considered.”

HERE'S WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID ABOUT HUGH FOX

Bill Ryan in The Unborn Book: “Hugh Fox is the Paul Bunyan of American Letters, part myth, part monster, and, myself-as-subject, a magnificent non-stop storyteller.”

“’Buddha revolving between Inner Calm and an opening Spiritual Retina on the impossible Now is the wisdom from Hugh Fox, poet-visionary extrordinaire....” Rambunctious Review, Vol. XVIII, 2001-2002.

“Fox...is a poet, scholar and critic who has ambitions as a playwright as well. The plays in this collection aren’t your standard Arthur Miller or Thornton Wilder fare. They are more like Samuel Beckett on acid. Fox writes the way he talks: a rapid fire stream-of-consciousness, full of anecdotes....and arcane esoteric references from his seventy-five eclectic years,” Review by Doug Holder of Ommmmmm: A Collection of Plays and Monologues, on Ibbeson Update. 1/28/07.

“...Barriers don’t last long around Hugh Fox. He is the ultimate explorer of the self....Whitman, in Song of Myself, only grazes the

surfaces that Fox penetrates. Henry Miller is demure compared to Hugh Fox...” from the introduction by Eric Greinke to Time published by Presa:S:Press in 2005.

“ [Fox’s] poetry resounds with a wisdom both primal and spiritual. His mind and spirit wander the world, hopeful and despairing, looking back on ghosts of the past and forward in search of proof that our existence will not end.” Review of Defiance (Higganum Hill Books, 2007), on Galatea Resurrects #10, on-line, Summer, 2008.

“Hugh Fox is a Professor Emeritus, archeologist, editor, writer, and iconic poet of international fame.His poetic styles range from super academic to Dadaistic to surrealistic to avant garde to post-Bukowski realism. For decades, whatever his creative style at the time, fans have celebrated the earthy and erudite poetry experience that is Hugh Fox.” Review of The Collected Poetry of Hugh Fox (WorldAudience, 2008) by Laurel Johnson.