Julie Doxsee, Objects for a Fog Death (Black Ocean, 2010)"Objects for a Fog Death is a series of odes to images and objects, and to the “you” responsible for distancing these images and objects from mortal relationships. With this distance comes a profound desire and a heightening awareness of earthly proximity. Through the accompanying hypnagogic verses, oceans quiet the voice while disorientation hurls it into a temporary place—hovering overhead or shying away in the murk. Is a river an object? Is fog an object? Or for that matter, is fog a place? Behind this book lies a call for rescue from confinement and immobility, from the ineffability of touch. Out of this fog springs forth the coeval shriek of something that will not be reduced to love."
“Doxsee delivers coherence applied through language handled with subtle, deliberate emotion-fueled sense. ‘Set your / cloud to the kind of clock / vultures circle,’ and take in this book’s direct address to poetry’s paradoxical glance toward the axis on which mortality rests. This is a disturbing book, as it ought to be. Our situation is, we are, disturbing.” — Dara Weir
“What joy to find concision and fleet imagination conspiring so closely in this book. Doxsee constructs lyric ladders—structures made of twig, wing, fog, and magnet—that pull us up into the 'cartoon-ripe’ ether of her fancy and keen perception. When Doxsee writes, ‘Of the / sorts of vine, I prefer, divine,’ the reader can only agree, lingering in the garland of these pages.” — Elizabeth Robinson
“Julie Doxsee has already produced a remarkable body of work. Her second book, Objects for a Fog Death, announces itself as a new dimension; a larger, more vulnerable, and more ambitious engagement with mind and matter. Just as the boundaries of fog are ever shifting, so are these brilliant poems, which redefine themselves and the genre with every page. These are poems which cause lemons to fly out of trucks and leave watermarks on the sky—I believe that.” — Bin Ramke
Julie Doxsee, Undersleep (Octopus Books, 2008)"In her debut collection Julie Doxsee's finely wrought lyric poems create a world operating according to the rules of dream-logic. Both exquisite and unsettling, her poems twist the reader with every line break and surprise of language."
"Spare, bright, and sharp these poems spark, tossing up unexpected words, making strange connections, inventing vocabulary, and in general, cracking open the natural world and letting us watch it tick. Intimate and worldly at the same time, Julie Doxsee is a surprising and deeply gifted poet, and this, her first book, glows in the dark." —Cole Swensen
"These are the secret nighttime children's tales that parents aren't allowed to read, the winking sparks sent up from the bonfire. They flicker into a vast vaulted space where all is black around. Here, the body of language is stripped of its flesh. And the poem-bones begin to dance—the joints of human language and its articulations. It's a little bit scary." — Eleni Sikelianos
"The debut full-length poetry collection by author Julie Doxsee, Undersleep features a fluidly brief economy of words that nonetheless evoke ripples from the reader's unconsciousness. Touched with the emotional longing, Undersleep shines with the brilliant promise of a half-formed dream. "Peripheral": Paradise is not a thing to keep. / Shadows are little nighttimes / for pronouncing / night's hymn. // Night's hymn / cannot contain / doses of / Paradise. Sleep / is a movement through not. // Undersleep thickens want as it prods. / Make the proper substitutions above." — Midwest Book Review
"Many of the poems from Julie Doxsee's Undersleep feel like descendants of early Robert Creeley poems, especially those from Words. The torque one feels moving from line to line is very much like the experience of reading a Graham Foust poem. The density of other poems and the way individual words seem packed full of content, bear similarities to the work of Rae Armantrout. For the most part, however, Doxsee's poems are exotic and lack strong comparison. Perhaps their most unique characteristic is their obtrusiveness, which derives from predecessors while simultaneously creating an architecture all its own. Take the poem "Ice Shapes," which contains many of the idiosyncrasies that can be found throughout Undersleep:
A mercury spill
follows you, spelling
between figure 8s:
the large cloud
fell from the wall
with sugar-water before
leaping to the magnet
wall. A curl of my
pillow-head-you
goes upsidedown
with a vase of orchids
as the evening
new pulls a flood
of ink from every
pen on earth.
"Ice Shapes," like many of Doxsee's poems, seems to exist in a realm where imaginative language flirts with physicality. The "mercury spill" in the opening line of "Ice Shapes" creates an unfamiliar context. The inclusion of the nonspecific "you" in the second line abruptly brings the poem back into focus by forcing the reader to consider itself within the zone of this bizarre circumstance. This conflation of poem-world and reader-world allows the "Ice Shapes" to unravel in a way that is wholly mysterious, as the "mercury spill" proceeds to write "between figure 8s." Much like the "mercury spill," these lines have an affronting quality built upon an internal logic which is both impressive and opaque. The "figure 8s" might be taken for infinity symbols and/or a type of knot; but what matters more is that their presence is integral to the construction of the poem. The "mercury spill" that precedes them and the strange procession of objects that follow seem welded together. Each one is a keystone.
The lines that follow are similarly confounding: a cloud falls from a wall with sugar water "before leaping to the magnet / wall," "... as the evening / new pulls a flood / of ink from every / pen on earth." While one could easily take on the task of ascribing meaning into each moment in the poem, the integrity and significance of Doxsee's poems comes from their sculptural qualities. Each poem in Undersleep affects the space around it; the space on the page, perhaps even the reader's space, the brainspace one uses to conceive the more chimerical compositions of poetry. Many of the poems in Undersleep function like sculptures in a gallery; they force an observer to navigate through and reconsider the space they inhabit. This is an array of poems that touch you in unique, troubling and frequently pleasurable ways." - Ben Mirov
