Raven King

“Raven King is a scintillating book full of twists and turns, unexpected images, prophetic voices, and flights of fancy that are more like detonations. It's a glitter bomb of a book—serious yet disarming, charming yet devastating, haunting yet grounded. Language in Raven King fractures and then is born again, given this poet's unflinching diction. This is the poetry that will sustain us when the patriarchy finally burns to the ground. This is a poetry of fierce intelligence, fiery wit, and forthright commitment. This is a poetry of mystic revelation, and Fox Frazier is indeed a seer for our times.”

—Allison Joseph

“This is a book that honors the gendered dead, who are still vulnerable, still speaking.

A ‘fox-haired’ speaker visits their graves to listen, and this other kind of listening is the hallmark of wonder, as much as it is a grief practice, ‘the waves made/ by a body easing in.’ Raven King examines violence as a restless form, and makes a pathway through this material: ‘to what?’ Here, a reader's attention constellates, in the culture made by aftermath itself.”

—Bhanu Kapil

“Too often, women who write about gender-based violence are told that their stories aren’t

universal, even as violence against women and femmes is a tale as old as time. In Raven King,

poet Fox Henry Frazier subverts this faulty assumption by creating a world that is both timeless and yet entirely recognizable as our own, and, in doing so, reminds us of the ongoingness of this worldwide—and often deeply personal—crisis. Frazier is a poet of beautiful abundance; reading the poems in Raven King is a pleasure for the senses as well as a knock and a boon to the heart.”

—Lynn Melnick, author of Landscape with Sex and Violence

“Incandescent, scathing. A lyrical anti-fairytale. A conjuring. To open this book is to wander the rural churchyards and railyards of upstate NY; to speak with Erzsébet Báthory, the centuries-dead Hungarian female serial killer; to meet spirit mediums, seers, grieving mothers, witches of all kinds. Raven King is an indictment of the spiritual sickness that causes gendered violence, an elegy for all of the girls and women we have lost to the disease, and a lovesong for the female friendships that sustain us through times of darkness.”

—Mary McMyne, author of The Book of Gothel and Wolfskin

“Fox Henry Frazier asks us, ‘could we lose, and if so, what?’ & answers, ‘Our hearts…’

With sumptuous titles that remind us how complex the contexts of our emotions sometimes seem, how at odds and in tune with the immediacy of the body, and refrains that evoke a melody of wanderlust, the poems in Raven King declare for us that the resilience of the goddess burns in every woman. These poems glide through the liminal spaces of the spirit, weaving grief and rage, wielding vulnerability like a righteous blade afire with ravenous conviction. The heritage of past twines with the stark candor of the present, a feather-hued skull, a vine rendered from dream, recalling to us that violence has always been the rope walked by women at the hands of men, and that it does not need to be the tether keeping them from the fulfillment of a desire to embrace the freedom of wilderness and empowerment. In this collection, listen to the Medusa’s laugh and love the haunting ricochet of its turn to stony song in these lyrical, lithe, and luminous words.”

—Dr. Saba Syed Razvi, author of heliophobia and In the Crocodile Gardens