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Erasure Marks
Paperback
Publisher: Kelsay Books
Published: Feb 6 2026
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.31
Height: 0.20 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In Erasure Marks, Mary Fox charts in clear-eyed and tough-minded poems a long life well-lived and well-loved. Songs (memories) as fragile as breath find their human register here as she embarks from the silence of the womb into the sentimental education of being named, learning to read, being loved, knowing grief, the gendered tethering and untethering inside the domestic. It's all here - a chair saved, a bottle of cologne, a tone of a voice, the shape of absence in moonlight. Not done yet with living, Fox presents us a lyric arc that scintillates with the many wisdoms she had gathered inching and crawling and squirming through life's alien terrain, looking for solace, for home, a place to be herself.
-Dennis Hinrichsen, author, dementia lyrics
In Erasure Marks, Mary Fox takes readers on a journey that begins in infancy and continues into age. The losses accumulate with time: a lost sense of family, relatives and friends who leave or die or lose memory, a young girl's loss of innocence, spouses who are lost to divorce or death. The erasures are real, poignant, and sometimes beautiful; of lost love, Fox writes, I thought I could wrap you in memory of skin...Instead, you became the stuff of stars / a glitter of sky, a bit of light to wish upon...beyond the gravity of love. Despite the pain of these erasures, Fox ultimately finds, alongside loss, a hard-won sense of freedom, an opportunity to reclaim wholeness and return to her own sense of self: And so, I rise, shedding regrets, / arching skyward, breathing free - untethered.
-Laura Apol, author, Cauterized, former Poet Laureate of Lansing, Michigan
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