Josey Foo author of Tomie’s Chair ($13.95, Kaya)

“Like Endou, Josey Foo’s first book, Tomie’s Chair is an indefinable work. More choreography than inscription as though air were the page on which it were written,. As though composed out of doors. The chair is the most specific object in the field; it centers the field, but the chair is light and the center moves. The speaker a mere inference:’ that there are a thousand stories to affirm the negative of me and perhaps only one story to reverse it.’ A new work by Josey Foo maintains a beautiful fidelity to the space between objects, beings, words and honors its own immanence with her deft, invisible brush.” C.D. Wright

Josey Foo, a Chinese native of Malaysia, immigrated to the United Statesin the mid-1980’s. she was an undocumented alien for a few years after attending college and worked in New York City in cabinetry, restaurant work, and other trades. The undocumented period ended when she received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Brown University in 1990. Portions of her first book of prose poems and a picture story of a three-legged, traveling beagle, Endow Lost Roads) were included in the Best American Essays 1995. An evening-length concert dance piece set to her poems is forthcoming from the Leah Stein dance company. Foo has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and was the recipient of an eve of St. Agnes Poetry Award. A two-time Yale Series of Younger Poets finalist, Foo helps her husband Richard Ferguson run Crooked Shelf Books in Farmington, New Mexico and works as a lawyer-advocate in Shiprock on the Navajo Nation.




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