The First Flag

Affirmation, indictment, and essay, The First Flag resists the confines an insidious patriarchy places on our bodies, sexualities, and selves.

I want to tell you about etymology, transparency, excess, spontaneity, chance, and total embodiment. That aggression is propulsion toward visionary action. That we can resolve and transform ourselves through ever-malleable tools—psychoanalysis, myth and fairy tale, divination, allegory, incantation. Raccoons, birds, trees, sticks—all sorts of Whitman’s “divine materials”—are all around me and participating in the same life moment, and if I naturally am inclined to see the world as enchanted and conscious it doesn’t seem like appropriation. I want to tell you about excesses—of the body, the excessive astral body, excretions of the body and soul. I want to offer you a transcript of my human operating system and digress about the poet’s interest in, the poet’s political obsession with, origins, truth, beauty. I want to talk about so many things, flags and Ronald Reagan and cauls and succubi and symbols and shame and dismemberment and even things like Betsy Ross and Neptune in Pisces, and in so doing defend the nature and value of this thesis I’ve birthed and this essaying I can only dream-deliver, using that collectively-invented and collaboratively-sustained ball of fire called “Language.”

Publication Date: April 23, 2014

Format: Trade Paper

Dimension: 5.5 x 8.25

Page count: 180 pages

ISBN: 9781566893268

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Sarah Fox lives in Northeast Minneapolis where she co-imagines the Center for Visionary Poetics and also serves as a doula. She has taught poetry and creative writing at the University of Minnesota, the Perpich Center for Arts Education Arts High School, and to diverse populations in a variety of venues via the Loft, COMPAS, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and other community organizations throughout Minnesota for over 15 years. Coffee House Press published her book, Because Why, in 2006. She contributes posts on feminism, mysticism, astrology, and poetics to the multi-author arts and culture blog Montevidayo, and has won grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Academy of American Poets, and the Graduate Research Partnership Program at the University of Minnesota. Recent work appears in Conduit, Action, Yes, We Are So Happy To Know Something, Poetry City USA Vol 2, Spout, ElevenEleven, Rain Taxi, LUNGFULL!, and others. She performs poetry rituals and other acts of intersubjective communion in public and private spaces whenever she can.

“These well-wrought images showcase Fox’s skill with rendering image—a fundamental of poetry that she doesn’t subvert.”

—The Star Tribune

“The First Flag feels somehow so radical to me that I have difficulty finding language to describe it.” 

—Spoonriver

“A book fashioned from the quick and the dead, the raw and the cooked. In it, Sarah Fox has created something profoundly daring, unique, unsettling, and beautiful.”

—Tarpaulin Sky

“An LJ ‘poet to watch,’ Fox returns in a pastiche of form, intelligence, experience, and imagination with verse and essays of experimental design. . . . Fox has a gift for grit, and she’s not afraid to use it.”

—Library Journal

“It’s rare that a book gets me so excited that my notes fill up pages and pages, and I simply can't wait to start reviewing. . . . The First Flag did that for me.”

—Hazel & Wren

“The poems are some of the most human-animal poems I have read, disarming and beautiful, scary because they are about us, honest and rough, intelligent and real.”

—Tin House

“The First Flag is a mystic alimentary, blood, bone, and pearl poetics—utterly engaging in its seductive conversational tone.” 

—Nor Hall

“Anyone interested in visionary poetics and/or documentary poetics and/or radical feminist phenomenology should give this book a read.” 

—The Volta Blog

“This book is not fearless, but, like Notley’s Alette, it pushes through fear as it pushes through membranes of harm, violence, toxicity, ill-inheritance, silence and suppression to retrieve a kind of knowledge from the opposite side.” 

—Joyelle McSweeney

“[Fox’s poem ‘COMMA’] marks the arrival of a strong new voice for our continuing poetry project.”

—Jacket2

“Sarah Fox’s work is a force resisting a dysfunctional and still anti-woman medical industry.” 

—Drunken Boat