The Fight Across the River [a meditation on war] - a poem by Anne Valley-Fox (PRESALE)

The latest poetry from Anne Valley-Fox calls on historical and contemporary source material to meditate on war and humanity in our times.

The Fight Across the River [a meditation on war] will be published in paperback on June 2, 2026. Preorders will ship prior to publication.

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