Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle,Verse Daily, The American Journal of Poetry, Plume, Diode, Flock, Spillway, Nashville Review, Hobart, and elsewhere. She’s authored seven poetry collections, most recently Junkie Wife (Moon Tide Press), The Dead Kid Poems (KYSO Flash Press), Stiletto Killer (Edizone Italia) and EROTIC: New & Selected (NYQ Books). Her next book, BRAZEN, again from NYQ Books, publishes in 2023. Her photographs are featured worldwide, including the covers of Pithead Chapel, Witness, The Pedestal Magazine, and The Chiron Review. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Daily. She lives with her husband on the bluffs of San Pedro overlooking the Pacific Ocean, just a stone’s throw from downtown Los Angeles. www.alexisrhonefancher.com
Cynthia Atkins is the author of Psyche’s Weathers, In The Event of Full Disclosure (CW Books, 2007) and Still-Life With God (Saint Julian Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, BOMB, Cleaver Magazine, Diode, Florida Review, Green Mountains Review, Rust + Moth, North American Review, Seneca Review, Thrush, Tinderbox, and Verse Daily. She was formerly the assistant director for the Poetry Society of America, and she has taught English and Creative Writing, most recently at Blue Ridge Community College. She is an Interviews Editor for American Microreviews and Interviews. Atkins earned her MFA from Columbia University and has earned fellowships and prizes from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Writer’s Voice, and Writers@Work.
Atkins lives on the Maury River of Rockbridge County, Virginia, with artist Phillip Welch and their family. More work and info at: www.cynthiaatkins.com
Praise for Duets:
Both of these poets are a tough act to follow, yet they follow each other throughout the collection with poem after stunning poem, each one raising the stakes anew with every turned page. The big picture and the smallest details are tended to with equal skill. They miss nothing. Two formidable artists, two courageous voices, telling it like it is. Unforgettable.
—Lorette C. Luzajic, editor of The Ekphrastic Review
If Alexis Rhone Fancher and Cynthia Atkins hear a lovesick howling outside their windows at night, it won’t be some sad wolf trying to get a slice of the moon. It’ll be me pining away for more poems. When I began Duets, I had the idea to borrow the word “chemistry” from when two actors work well together, but the word is totally insufficient. Duets is electricity, lightning, ekphrasis exploding into brilliant metaphors. Whether you “want to hitch a ride with a comely vagabond, a poet” or jump on the subway that “rips through the city, opening its / doors,” these poets and their strange, sexy, irreverent poems are extending their hearts, offering you a ride. Some writers responding to a series of images might be tempted to freeze them as moments in time, but Fancher and Atkins have instead fashioned a sequence of poetic narratives that open the many delicious possibilities inherent within a moment, narratives lit on the wicks of sorrow and surprise and human longing, narratives that remind us that sometimes holding a book is really holding fire in our hands.
—Melissa Studdard, author of Dear Selection Committee
In Duets, Alexis Rhone Fancher’s evocative photographs serve as the inspiration for poems about motherhood and loss, love and lust. Fancher and Cynthia Atkins use their poetic voices to praise and to question, to rejoice and to grieve. These two voices: equally striking, vastly different. Like any good duet, this book is an example of how beauty doesn’t always work in symmetry and parallels—it works in contrasts and intersections too.
—Gustavo Hernandez, author of Flower Grand First