Bøger af Tom Sleigh

A profound encounter with the hyperreality of our time of global upheaval, violence, and pandemic.Tom Sleigh's poems are skeptical of the inevitability of our fate, but in this brilliant new collection, they are charged with a powerful sense of premonition, as if the future is unfolding before us, demanding something greater than the self. Justice is a prevailing force, even while the poems are fully cognizant of the refugee crisis, war, famine, and the brutal reality of a crowded hospital morgue. The King's Touch collides the world of fact and the world of mystery with a resolutely secular register. The title poem refers to the once-held belief that the king, as a divine representative, is imbued with the power of healing touch. Sleigh turns this encounter between illness and human contact toward his own chronic blood disease and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its mounting death tolls. One poem asks, "isn't it true that no matter how long you / wear them, masks don't grieve, only faces do?"In this essential new work, Sleigh shows how the language of poetry itself can revive and recuperate a sense of a future under the conditions of violence, social unrest, and global anxiety about the fate of the planet.

Space Walk blasts off into realms of experience that show the imagination's limitless capacity to be both brutal and uplifting. While many of the poems in this daring collection confront head-on our current American realities of empire, state violence, the endless ?crisis chatter? of talking heads, and the eerie, weightless feeling of catastrophe, they are tethered to the gravitational pull of love and hope. In Sleigh's poems, rocket engines and pancake houses, space stations and mom's kitchen, terrorist organizations and Sundays in a museum are all part of love's galactic amplitude. Hailing Tom Sleigh's work, the Los Angeles Times has written that he ?stakes a claim on the planet of the imagination.? In The New Yorker's words, he ?asserts the importance of poetry itself,? showing us, in Space Walk, its restorative, recuperative powers.

Widely considered one of the finest poets of his generation, Tom Sleigh brings to his fifth collection his trademark intensity and craftsmanship, mixing the streetwise edginess of popular culture with Greek and Latin references, myth, and dramatic lyrics. Passionately comprehensive in its understanding of contemporary reality, Far Side of the Earth is unique in its moral gravitas, consolatory power, and strangeness of vision.