Sunday Oct 18, 2026 at 7pm

Westbeth Community Rm
155 Bank Street
enter through courtyard and under scaffolding
New York, NY 10014

Vocal backup with Tom Ireland

Praise for “The Fight Across the River”:

“The Fight Across the River is a single, relentless poem that cries out through inherited voices as history repeats itself. Anne Valley-Fox builds a choral work from historical records, tracing the perpetuation of violence through language, loyalty, fear, and succession. This work does not argue or console. It anatomizes, leaving behind not a position but a responsibility: to see what persists, and to notice where we are standing when we see it.”
—Robert Saltzman, author of The Ten Thousand Things

“The Fight Across the River is a powerful, painful way of learning history, well worth reading even for those of us who think we have a handle on the horrors of war. It is especially poignant these days when we find ourselves on the wrong bank of the river, when war is aimed inward, at the heart of our own beliefs, our own homes, our own families, by our own people.”
—Lucy R. Lippard, author of A Different War

“From the malicious destruction of 3,000 Navajo peach trees in Canyon de Chelly to the carnage of WWI and WWII, the slaughters in Korea and Viet Nam, the ruination of Gaza and many more calamities of hate, Anne Valley-Fox’s magnificent poetic meditation on the ‘savage depravity’ of war unflinchingly confronts monstrous realities of human nature that most of us try never to even think about. The Fight Across the River is right up there with the great anti-war poems in American literature.”
—V. B. Price, author of Orpheus the Healer and Other Poems

Bio for Anne Valley-Fox

Anne Valley-Fox was born in Paterson, New Jersey, a year after the first atomic explosion.
She was educated at UC Berkeley, where she took poetry classes with Josephine Miles and James Tate, and was thrilled to hear Denise Levertov read her poems. On the eve of publishing Telling Your Story (Doubleday, 1973, with Sam Keen), she took her nom de plume from a race horse.

Valley-Fox has lived in northern New Mexico at the foot of Sangre de Cristo Mountains for four decades. In addition to five volumes of oral histories culled from The New Mexico Writers’ Project, her publications include The Household Muse (essays) with Tom Ireland (Tres Chicas Press, 2020) and six collections of poetry, most recently, The Fight Across the River [a meditation on war] (Casa Urraca Press, 2026). Valley-Fox is a recipient of a William Matthews Poetry Prize and a Mark Fischer Poetry Prize.

For more please see AnneValleyFox.com