Poetry, winner of the 2025 Fledge Poetry Chapbook Award: Unfruitful speaks to much of both the barrenness, the emptiness, the “un-progress”—or sense/feeling of such—of these contemporary times we are living through, as it does to the shifting or reframing, and recalibration of meaning and value we must adopt beyond the physical primacy of an environment ever pushing the myth of individualism.

Doxey’s use of the topic of fragmentation in relation to wholeness (and all things wholly—and holy) is mirrored in the structure employed in her poetics. Unfruitful is an exploration of the whole as ineffable and unfathomable and yet a territory wherein we find meaning in fragmentation. We find through studying the interconnected nature of all things—this ontological mystery found in the literal biological queerness of all things—that fragment is all we know, all we have experienced, perceived, and that so much of our desire for meaning of “the whole” can only be found in the meaning we divine (or weave, or constellate) from fragments, pieces, and nodal points of discovery & experience—that fragmentation is our only digestible narration (and highly suited to poetry) when we humbly realize our limited abilities as individuals—an as individuals, we are ourselves but fragments.

Throughout the collection, the allusions to “unbearing,” and growth or expansion discounted of any multiplication—or even through “unfruitfulness”—emerges a subtle subtext that is highly important to the overall theme of Unfruitful and its constellationary [sic.] form. Through the reading this becomes the lens with which one can eventually read the whole in a new light, and thus literally embodies the or illustrates the thematic exploration, offered as an invitation of experience to the reader.