Primate Fox by Hugh Fox
"What I've finally come to is to simply live inside mystery, the inexplicable, the impossible-to-be-explained, an impossible-to-exist me living inside an impossible-to-exist universe."
—Hugh Fox
Primate Fox: Late Poems (2010-2011) is the final collection of poems by small-press icon Hugh Fox.
HUGH BERNARD FOX JR. (1932 – 2011), born in Chicago, was a writer, novelist, poet and anthropologist and one of the founders (with Ralph Ellison, Anaïs Nin, Paul Bowles, Joyce Carol Oates, Reynolds Price and others) of the Pushcart Prize for literature. He received a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was a professor at Michigan State University in the Department of American Thought and Language from 1968 until his retirement in 1999.
He received Fulbright Professsorships at the University of Hermosillo in Mexico in 1961, the Instituto Pedagogico and Universidad Catlica in Caracas from 1964 to 1966, and at the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil from 1978-1980. He met his third wife Maria Bernadete Costa in Brazil in 1978. He studied Latin American literature at the University of Buenos Aires, received an OAS grant and spent a year as an archaeologist in the Atacama Desert in Chile in 1986. He was the founder and Board of Directors member of COSMEP, the International Organization of Independent Publishers, from 1968 until its death in 1996. He was editor of Ghost Dance: The International Quarterly of Experimental Poetry from 1968-1995.
He wrote over fifty-four books of poetry, many volumes of short fiction and novels. Hugh's final novel was Reunion, published by Luminis Books in summer 2011.
Many fine writers have taken an opportunity to praise Hugh Fox:
"Hugh Fox’s poems live in two worlds—they are both now and then, they speak and are silent, they are print and voice...Only through words, that most difficult of adversaries, can one mediate ultimate problems, reveal and validate experience, and his do."
—Russel B. Nye, winner of the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel
"Hugh Fox is the Paul Bunyan of American Letters, part myth, part monster, and, myself-as-subject, a magnificent non-stop storyteller."
—Bill Ryan in The Unborn Book
"Like Charles Ives, like Herman Melville, Hugh Fox is an American original. There is no one else writing like him today."
—Richard Morris
"Half a century ago Hugh Fox exited a motel room, struggling under the combined weight of a “total change in the way he saw the world” plus three suitcases. That room was occupied by Charles Bukowski, and those suitcases were loaded with his works. Hugh Fox was our Chuck-Buk. He laid upon us a hundred books and a new world view. It’s up to us to see if we can run this relay race as beautifully as he did."
—Tom Bradley, author of Bomb Baby and Fission Among the Fanatics
"Fox is the sort of writer one does fall in love with, bowled over by charms you’d never guess would have worked and willingly ignoring behaviors and inclinations that in the abstract would be instant deal busters. Fox knows this and utilizes it to his full advantage. His work is an affirmation of life that deserves a lasting embrace: in other words, full tilt or nothing. Reading Hugh Fox’s work holds you as it should, as the dead do, as the living would."
—Patrick James Dunagan, NewPages.com
Primate Fox: Late Poems (2010-2011)
by Hugh Fox
$15, paperback, 84pp
ISBN-13: 978-0-9885490-1-2
