Reading Lessons

Reading Lessons by Mary Fox takes us on the universal journey of reading context in every day experiences. Her poetry collection reveals how, from the day we are born, our reading lessons commenced. We read a mother’s touch, a father’s laughter and an uncle’s love engraved in body language—where love letters and divorce decrees are no match for the punctuation of a lover’s caress, where grief is but a reminder that life is abundant in unfinished stories. Fox also asks that we read the signs pointing the way to a meaningful life, those signs prodding us to stop revising other people’s stories and finally focus on finishing our own narrative—to take a bite out of the apple, swallowing the seeds and await what will grow within each of us. —Alan Harris, poet and author of Hospice Bed Conversations and Fall Ball, poetry for the late innings. In Reading Lessons, Mary Fox brings to the page the formerly “unread” and “un-syllabled” in poems that move deftly from family to former lovers to musical scores and palms and lips. They inhabit that space just beyond the eyes and mind where the world and our place in it become clear and clearly vibrant through this writer’s attention. Here, absence, a throbbing in the bones, as she states in one poem, finds its shape in moonlight. —Dennis Hinrichsen, Greater Lansing Poet Laureate and author of SKIN MUSIC