Online Publications

A punk photographer, performance-artist and writer, Susan Fox works within and beyond the transgressive, the digressive, and the confessional—detonating boundaries of flesh, form, and taboo in literature and politics. With the diaristic fury of Kathy Acker and the ecstatic somatics of Hélène Cixous, Fox wields cunt as oracle and rupture—an anti-dic(k)tion from the primal void where sex, death, and language evolve, convulse, and dissolve. Her poetic philosophy engages Julia Kristeva’s abjection and Luce Irigaray’s mimetic insurgency, invoking the body not as signifier, but as screaming text.

It was early evening at the end of June 2019, and I was looking out of my second-floor apartment window at the courtyard-come-car park ringed by abandoned eighteenth-century school buildings, a dilapidated and abandoned hotel and our brutalist slab of concrete and glass. Bees were bobbing among the lavender and butterflies sipping the nectar of water-blue irises, what I thought earlier was a pile of dog shit under the rear of our car I now saw to be a hen blackbird, it must be injured and, as I looked, it rolled over. At the same time, one of the courtyard cats, the black and white tuxedo one that lived downstairs, used the stone walls as cover and moved towards the blackbird. I thought of shouting but didn’t. I thought of going down to see if I could help the bird. I didn’t. I would let nature do what it has always done. As the cat slipped under a car, the bird sprang up, hopped from the shadow into the sunlight and flew up onto a wall above the confounded cat.