"What are you looking for? I think you'll find it here in Richard H. Fox's second poetry collection, wandering in puzzle boxes. They're all present and accounted for: the poems of love and loss, health and healing, identity and homage, the lyrics and the narratives intertwined. When this speaker tells me, 'I want to wear Coke-bottle glasses, corneas blue whale eyes,' I believe him. In fact, I'd follow this man down Alligator Alley and the Massachusetts Turnpike. I'd stand beside him in 'the mourner's waiting line,' share a beer while 'a folk singer/belts out francophone lyrics over a dreadnought.' I say I would, but I already have. Put your thumb out, and hitch this humble, honest ride."
~ Julie Marie Wade, When I Was Straight and Postage Due
wandering in puzzle boxes
"Eleanor Roosevelt spoke of the confidence and courage that come when one has looked fear in the face. She could have been speaking about Rich Fox, whose new book is testament to that remarkable confidence and courage. These poems ring with a power and intensity that come only after achieving a kind of fearlessness, having looked fear in the face and becoming empowered to speak honestly and with great conviction now about love and war and loss and friendship. Fox wanders in the puzzle box of life with a clear-eyed intensity, as a gifted writer, observer and friend to us all, writing with 'flashes of yearning, grace' about this puzzling, mysterious, and infinitely beautiful world."
- John Hodgen, AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, author of Grace and Heaven & Earth Holding Company
"Fox is a writer worth paying attention to."
~ Victor D. Infante, Telegram.com
"Richard Fox’s unique muse wanders through the landscapes of cancer, aging, mourning, Judaism and Boomer memory to produce poems of riveting power and imagination. His cancer poems are unforgettable and his remembrances of times past and friends lost are propelled by a compelling lyrical narrative that seeks to unlock the truth from the puzzle boxes of life and loss within us."
- Joe Pacheco, Sanibel Joe's Songbook and Alligator in the Sky