Most of his life, Braden Fox wrote poetry and prose as a way to figure the world out and explain it to himself. In April of 2025, Fox compiled nearly 60 years’ worth of his writing and published them in a collection called Relationships in Rhyme.
Poet Braden Fox. (Photo by Tony Pratt/My Sun Day News)
Putting his writing together in a volume had been on his mind for nearly 20 years, but lack of confidence kept Fox from taking the final step to publishing. Three years ago, Fox moved into Sun City and discovered that his next-door neighbor, Herb Fuqua, was writing a book. Fox felt encouraged.
“[Herb] is a Vietnam veteran and has been with the Salvation Army for practically his whole life,” says Fox. “I thought, ‘If there’s a book in him, there’s a book in me.’”
Fox enjoyed the coincidence.
“I thought it amusing that next door neighbors would each crank out a book, which is not everyone’s daily endeavor,” says Fox.
Relationships in Rhyme is divided into sections such Love, Nature, and Self, and Fox describes it as nonlinear.
“Every poem is as random as the people you meet on the street. One time I might meet one kind of person and write about it, another time it could be about a sunset I see,” he says. “One of the basic motivations of writing, for me, is trying to put myself in other people’s shoes.”
In one of his early poems, Fox wrote the line, “If pollywogs can change to frogs and caterpillars to butterflies, then why can’t I, as a human being, metamorphosize?”
Fox hopes his writing resonates with readers who are questioning things, looking for what to believe in, or feeling disappointment in the world around them.
“If we’re going to live and we’re going to have experiences, we may as well share them,” he says. “This book is for anyone going through introspection and wanting to get away from the day-to-day stuff.”
When trying to name his book, Fox decided on Relationships in Rhyme. “It hit me that we have relationships with everything from the animate to inanimate, every molecule and atom. As Dr. Carl Sagan often said, “We are made of star-stuff.”
