“To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth – I count that something of a miracle.”  ~Henry Miller

“When sex involves all the senses intensely, it can be like a mystical experience.” ~Jim Morrison

To read Alexis Rhone Fancher’s poetry is to step into a mesmerizing journey — one that is as emotionally resonant as it is erotically charged and spiritually powerful.

How?

Well, all those aspects are the artist Rhone Fancher’s superpower, which resonates with the reader at every level of perception and at any time. Her work pushes beyond the boundaries of memory and vision, using desire as both subject and portal.

The poems widely open what feels like a secret and forbidden door, yet they do so with a sense of refinement and sophistication. The writing is magnetic, aristocratic in its elegance, never vulgar, but always unflinchingly honest and exquisitely crafted. Words carry the weight of lived experience and profound emotion.

What feels deeply personal in Alexis Rhone Fancher’s poems often becomes something universal. The intimacy she shares could easily be ours if we dare to look closely and let ourselves inhabit the vivid images she creates. Each poem points to the mysteries of sexuality and the strange union of lust and love, wish and desire, fear and interest, showing how all these categories of our identity are deeply and completely intertwined.

To fully understand Rhone Fancher’s work, it should be viewed as mystical union of poetry and sexuality, first, because it really covers the whole spectrum of imagery power from the classical, oldest antique tradition to post modern era, even post punk digital era, and it is not as literal or clinical subjects but as profound, symbolic expressions of the psyche’s underlying creative and transformative energies.

She sees both poetry and sexuality as windows into the universal archetypes of the collective library of the deep and very complicated collective unconscious, when text, as an expression of the collective unconscious, drives us forward and across ourselves. We can freely say that Rhone Fancher’s hypnotic and killingly real poetry is not only a product of the poet’s personal psychology but a manifestation of archetypal, primordial images from the collective unconscious.

There are three main characteristics in Alexis’s work:

Symbolism Over Personal Experience.
A Vision of the Depths.
The Creative Act.

By analyzing her symbolism and personal experience, we are facing the next level of her multi-emotional work, a vision of depths, when we see that her intuition not only predicts sexual desire but also fulfills it. This fulfilment leads us to the third aspect of her erotic drama: the creative act itself, when the poem appears as a real story of a real persona.

Her work does more than explore erotic passion; it transcends it. These poems transport us into deeper realms of intimacy, where beauty and pain are inseparable, and where pleasure approaches the divine. Alexis Rhone Fancher’s words bridge the bodily and the eternal, reminding us that poetry itself is one of the few forms capable of holding such contradictions — lust and transcendence, secrecy and revelation, the earthly and the timeless. And it is never pornographic. Never.

When my lover tells me I cannot say no, and I protest, she parts
my legs, says yes, baby. Yes. I do what I’m told. No becomes a foreign
country. I take it as permission. Open season.

By reading Alexis Rhone Fancher’s words, we should remember that she tears the plain wrapper off erotica. She refuses to play safe strips away pretense, intent on exposing the fragility, angst, and longing lurking just below the sexual surface, her bestselling work EROTIC (New York Quarterly, May, 2021) features poems and flash never before seen in any collection, as well as gems from Rhone Fancher’s other erotic offerings, BRAZEN, for example, another bestselling work (New York Quarterly, 2023) or even How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen & Other Heart Stab Poems (Sybaritic Press, 2014) and Enter Here (Kyso Flash Press, 2017) or Junkie Wife (Moon Tide Press, 2018).

And this poetic and artistic openness is part of the game, passionately offering us some truths, if we dare to open the book and follow the words. As she’s quoted:

I write about women like me, women who own their sexuality and take responsibility for their choices. It may seem I’m writing about sex, but really, I’m writing about power.

And this line, when she delivers a raw and uncompromising message, “No names were changed. No one was innocent.”

The poet’s voice is clear, firmly refusing sentimentality, and it has a devastating force as well. In “Flirting with Death—A Love Poem,” (Junkie Wife / Moon Tide Press, 2018) she begins with the line, “In love with the rush. Not the high,” a matter-of-fact declaration that immediately sets the register for what follows. Here, love and destruction are intertwined, as the language oscillates between intimacy and detachment.

“I’m telling you, I don’t know who I am. No one else knows, either.”

Rhone Fancher’s powerful imagination, her experience, and, of course, her poetic gift lie in this duality: she captures the allure of living on the edge while simultaneously exposing the harrowing consequences. The result is a multi-emotional body of work that resonates on both a visceral and intellectual level, asking readers to confront the seductions and brutalities of addiction without flinching.

The phenomenon of memories and the past itself is the main landmark in Alexis’s world. In her work, the poet invites readers to follow her through a vivid, unflinching exploration of a checkered past. The misadventures she recounts are at once daring and disarming, laced with humor, candor, and a wry confessional tone. While her verses may quicken the pulse and stir desire, they do more than titillate. At their core, these poems reveal a voice capable of tenderness as well as provocation — a voice that might just steal your soul, your identity, your whole personality. So, you’d better watch out during the reading.

In general, readers may long to get closer to her, but closeness comes only through the work itself. Rhone Fancher maintains an invisible edge between poet and audience, a deliberate distance that becomes part of the reading experience. To engage with her poetry is to take a test of one’s own honesty. Without truthfulness, her work will not yield its power. With it, however, her poems reveal something profound: that honesty in sexuality is, at its core, a form of freedom.

And here is the one thing — the tragic happening that occurred in her life — losing her 26-year-old son. Despite this, she remained (and remains) fully strong, fully balanced, and fully aware and writes about her experience with incredible decency and strength. “Every Day Is Mother’s Day,” she writes (The Dead Kid’s Poems / Kyso Flash Press, 2019) and empathizes with her sister, recognizing that her sister, too, has lost a child. Yes. No words.

“I remember his early birth, that new baby smell, his eyes bright and focused on mine, as if I could show him the way.”

But ultimately, her deeply emotional poems mourn all lost children, even addressing the almost daily school shootings in the U.S. The poet documents the horrors and hopes, tragedy and resilience, surrealism and magical realism together, and the total madness of the news catastrophic stream swallowing everything and everywhere, sending the message of hope, message of love, real love, of how she witnesses an endless stream of dead kids—killed by active shooters, car crashes, overdose or suicide, or cancer. Adding that she is keeping writing as a poet, as a human being, as a woman, and as a mother.

Alexis delivered a beautiful message and an outstanding contribution to the poetry world today. She is strong not only because of her characteristics, talent, skills, choice, hope, and faith, but by her own light, that mysterious flickering flame which shines through her works with some different passion. She knows what readers want, ecstasy, but she never offers everything at once; she offers it gradually, methodically, and this is another part of the game, an intellectual erotism, a classy sexuality, crowned with the high-class poetic libido. A real ecstasy.

Watch her head! she cries,
and flings herself across the yard,
lunges for Holly through the glass.
Baby! Baby! she sobs,
the reason for their discord is forgotten.
Holly mouths a sloppy kiss.
Marie opens her robe,
presses herself against the glass.
Can you believe it?
I would give anything to be loved like that.

We know these names, among American poets, who have written explicitly about sexuality/erotism, several names stand out for breaking taboos and reshaping the genre: Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Gluck and Sharon Olds, Charles Bukowski (by the way, Rhone Fancher eats him for breakfast) and Richard Siken, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and, more recently, poets such as Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, and Kim Addonizio and even more, and so on. Today’s world is very open regarding this subject; there is no boundary anymore, and no one knows whether the total absence of boundaries is good or not. It is just what it is. Alexis Rhone Fancher, among these figures, has become a cultural touchstone, expanding the possibilities of erotic and confessional verse. Yet she occupies a different space than others. Her poetic persona, her story, and her uncompromising honesty distinguish her from everybody. She possesses a kind of magic — a spell woven through her lines — that strikes directly at the heart.

During this journey, the reader will notice that her poetry, in this sense, is an emergent property of the psyche, not something that can be reduced to a more basic truth. It is the truth itself, when you can feel the process of writing poetry, how she felt everything before writing it down, a form of imaginative desire, and sexual premonition that helps the psyche achieve balance, similar to how dreams function.

It might take your spirit and temper if you read her work unbalanced. It works perfectly when you (as a reader) fully trust her work and follow her call, because those magnetic stanzas and images risk missing their true force if you lose your balance; that’s how the poetry of Rhone Fancher fully unfolds itself right in front of you by trusting your own naked feelings, and the wonders of revelation arrive at the end.

This god hides in your broken places.
This god is willing to wait.
When you’re ready to surrender,
remember:  this is your last, best chance.
This god will not stick by you,
won’t give you false hope.
This god will kill you.
Or save you. Choose.

The sequence of Rhone Fancher’s poetry is particularly inventive, offering a layered resonance that readers may find both empathetic and revealing. While its earlier stanzas carefully construct the scene, it is the ending that delivers the greatest impact — a twist shaped by irony, by the disparity of experience, and by an emotional and intellectual complexity that lingers long after the last line.

Her poetry world, in general, ignites linguistically through its use of slang, an inventive exploration of the precious emotional and intellectual conditions of poetry and sexuality. It is relevant, actual, passionately hypersonic, prestigious, elevating, heart-shaking, and entertaining, alongside deeply solid, monolithically serious works, which ground her books in gravity and emotional depth. Brilliant.

“When you smile in your sleep, I get nervous. I know what you are capable of.”

About the reviewer: David Dephy is an award-winning American poet, novelist, multimedia artist, and the founder of Poetry Orchestra. In 2025, he received the Nassau County Poet Laureate Award in New York and served as the Poet-in-Residence for Brownstone Poets from 2024 to 2025. NASA, Lunar Codex, and Brick Street Poetry sent his poem, “A Sense of Purpose,” to the Moon in 2025. Dephy was exiled from his native country of Georgia and received indefinite political asylum in the U.S. His wife and son joined him in 2023 after six years of exile. He is recognized as a “Literature Luminary” by Bowery Poetry, a “Stellar Poet” by Voices of Poetry, and an “Incomparable Poet” by Statorec. He has also been called “Brilliant Grace” by Headline Poetry & Press and praised for his “Extremely Unique Poetic Voice” by Cultural Daily. He lives and works in New York City.