By Angele Ellis
FROM: Cultural Weekly/Vox Populi

Alexis Rhone Fancher might be Joan Didion’s daughter turned red-hot poet. Rhone Fancher’s first-person evocations of sexual love are landscapes of intensity and danger, located with laser-point specificity in a Los Angeles whose environment (both natural and manmade) shapes the erotic autobiography of a woman—or of numerous women—as much as ‘that Donna Karan sheath…with the slit up the side” shapes the speaker’s body in “Second Chances,” or the killer stilettos in “I Want Louboutin Heels” mold her feet in the relative chill of December, as follows:

…I want them slingback and peep-toed
so I can flash the purple polish
on my tootsies.
…

I want to wow them
on Washington, saunter past C & O Trattoria
and Nick’s Liquor Mart, those bottles of Stoli
stacked in the window, calling my name,

past the summer-clad tourists in December,
shivering, barefoot, like L.A.
has no winter.

Erotic’s poems are punctuated with black and white photographs by the author, also a noted photographer. There are street scenes reminiscent of Edward Hopper (“[n]o one paints loneliness like he does” states Rhone Fancher in the Hopper-inspired poem “White Flag”) and cropped portraits of beautiful bodies, both posed and candid. These photos pulse with the sensual energy as well as the sadness of the poet’s multilayered city. In “this small rain,” about the return of summer rain to “drought-wracked” Los Angeles, it is as if Rhone Fancher is taking snapshots: Read Rest of Review Here or Here