By Rose M. Smith

Within the first few lines of Kate Fox’s latest collection The Company Misery Loves (Sheila-Na-Gig 2024), we embark on a journey to consider the role of inevitability in shaping how we face or embrace life’s absolutes. In language that shimmers on the page, she becomes stage director, tour guide, host as we follow her lead over a marvelous succession of former landscapes.  We are invited in turn to believe and to suspend our former belief, to hear the author’s voice and the voices this author has shared so insightfully that one wonders when each poem’s speaker visited her bedside, pulled back the veil, guided her hand over the page.

Poems from the poet’s thoughts of home invite us with visceral, concrete images into each moment. Such is the craft at work in this collection that bids us to see “that oil mixed with rain / in a hubcap is beautiful, which it is / because you own it,” and long years later to walk the land under great emotional weight and behold “as the entry shawls itself / in brilliant leaves, and the mountain beside me / pulls the sun’s deep brim down over its eyes” as though even the land feels the loss of things past.

Just when you think you know what sort of work will be encountered throughout, Fox introduces us to beautifully dimensional voices such as Mary Shelley, Josephine Peary (wife of the admiral), and Kathleen Scott (widow of the Antarctic explorer), whose voice becomes a masterful device to illuminate us regarding Scott’s expedition and those of George Mallory. This present Kathleen Scott handles with alacrity having been mistaken for the wife of Ernest Shackleton as well as how she might have sculpted Mallory had she not found “Everest / holding fast its own.” This author threads much sound insight and fact into these historical poems without ever drifting out of poetic voice—there again, as with us at the beginning, empowering Scott with agency to recount or rewrite history as she pleases. And it pleases.

With misery in the title, yes, there is loss in this book—loss not shared for loss’ sake but because its inclusion is essential. The losses are here, but the art and beauty of this work is not diminished by what is inevitable for us all. These poems stare into the face of that inevitable and seem to say “this, too can be beautiful.” To repeat Jane Ann Fuller’s words, “This poetry is flawless.” Here is where I must confess exceptional bias. Having begun reading The Company Misery Loves, I was pleased to find this collection includes some of my favorite works by Kate Fox. Finally, I get to share my excitement at how deftly she also wraps biblical icons in humor and contemporary sensibility. Poems from Fox’s book The Lazarus Method retell age-old stories with brilliance. In our varied experiences, there are poems remembered because they were assigned or were the subject of debate. There are poems we witness in live readings that echo the poet’s voice inside us for days. Then there are poems that are remembered because they refuse to be forgotten. The Company Misery Loves draws us into the unforgettable like “human branches reaching armless / toward their maker.”

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Rose Smith‘s work has appeared in The Examined Life, Pirene’s Fountain, Snapdragon, Blood and Thunder, and other journals and anthologies. She is author of four chapbooks, most recently Holes in My Teeth from Kattywompus Press. Her collection, Unearthing Ida, won the Lyrebird Prize from Glass Lyre Press. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a Cave Canem Fellow.