Poetry
I find Toni Thomas' poems intensely interesting. Linguistically they are filled with marvellous moments. Every so often they slip into stunning observations, making us gasp almost, then slide back. The poems are extremely fresh.
Galway Kinnell
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Inside Her a River of Snow was Traveling
I want to say don’t make me ride a dead horse till I am sick with April see something more than the squalor of me. You hairpin words chop wood stack it neat as shop meat. I am almost forty not sure what I’ll do when the kids leave. Still vacuum up piles of dog hair gift wrap meals work at the school cafeteria scooping fake cheese onto the children’s lunch plates? |
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A Different Measure of Moonlight
He never said out loud she was delinquent too pie eyed to see the world straight. She never promised him a perfect life a woman willing to sacrifice her odd devotions at the altar of matrimony a slim girl without cake batter clamoring or those emerald shoes so loose on her winged feet as if in bystanding the world she knew it would part for her. |
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Here
This Marriage of turned soil bird eaten bean starts a sun that lifts her head above the horizon then bleeds this marriage of salt stained sheets smoldering flame wind that whips as it clarifies. Sometimes I trace your lips on a chalice wear white - virginal. You enter my chamber naked your hands burning and everything seems possible. |
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There is This
Maybe life was always meant to be understood like this a miracle waiting to happen. Small girls availing themselves of material light flowers that burst forth unnoticed indigo in the unclaimed woods. Your feet are poised between love and the back door jocular cousins that wear thin slippers to bare bone. |
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Bandits Come and Remove Her Body in the Night
When you conquer heaven will I be the first to see you in sunlight unburdening the curtains adrift in magenta your abbreviated hems no longer forlorn no longer baiting men with a mint coated breath but solvent self possessed even in a small, easy on the eyes way that denies the obduracy of roses their thorn flecked faces wages war on the apostles of plenty the walled garden of peonies finds that trace of immigrant sun marries the day? |
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In the Boarding House for Unclaimed Girls
We learn to consolidate flirt with scarcity, the half baked field road kill refuse the spotless bride pay as you go summer nail the wind to keep the sermon of leaves from fleeing. Tell me - when autumn casts her dark net who will call our name as holy as if we are more than the marooned rope shelved prophecy? The Things We Don't Know When the first words came they must have flirted a new planet ruby red, luminous Saturn's dazzle of rings felt like the trees waving the baby bouncer lifting us higher and higher to where the stars sip sugar milk every song is a gold canary In the Kingdom of Longing
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In the Pink Arms of the City
Is it true that what gets left behind sometimes saves that in the heart's lonely suitcase silence can offer up a breath more sonorous than bread? 
Love Adrift in the City of Stars I want to proposition- heart of my heart stay close as if you are cashmere my gull with the prize fish as if anything and everything is about to arrive for us. The Hotsy Totsy Ballroom
Set in New York in the 1940's, this collection follows a young woman at the Hotsy Totsy Ballroom where dancers attempt to become artists of the imagination, salve a world weary from war, disillusionment. I am your wildest casserole a Parisian tart of complex experience the hole in your wall am tiramisu cheesecake ancient bread bite into me slowly watch what falls away see what becomes of you. You'll be Fast as Lightning coveting my Painted Tail
inhabits a world where love is a subversion of slinky dresses, strangers live in our shoes, sea merchants wander, jewels grow on the leafless tree, permeable girls disappear summer evenings. When I cross the path to happiness will it speak to me as a snake devouring the mouse in the field or bend me into another kind of being who hears the collapse of the wind the sun's vigilance lozenges hope knows the climate of her own burning? Blue Halo continues to explore family, emotional trauma, marginalisation, addiction and loss in contemporary working class America. Once you could see in the dark flashed bright as a glow worm fluorescent my mother's lips coated you there was no cadence of brokenness. Once you built wood ramps climbed a fire escape scraped rust off the sky broke an arm reaching almost impervious inside her blue halo. Ace Raider of the Unfathomable Universe explores family, emotional trauma, marginalisation, addiction and loss in contemporary working class America. These poems testify to the deep bonds of love, the ties that even in the midst of hardship bind us. My brother's death may seem diminutive a quarter column in the newspaper the shy man who walks with a limp but if you think this way you will miss something the ruby in the pea the way dim surfaces hold colored light how a voice sounds when it's noticed not withered on the vine but unpeeled that what we truly witness saves Chosen Many poems to admire here - I recommend History Lessons, The Perilous Undertakings of the Everyday World, I Call Midnight among others - these poems are Toni Thomas' prayers, her psalms. "The reality exists in memory alone", Proust tells us, and this book of Chosen moments, chosen from many other moments of our time, stands up for that notion. Ilya Kaminsky Fast as Lightning When I cross the path of happiness will it speak to me only as the snake at dawn devouring the mouse in the field or bend me into another kind of being who hears the collapse of the wind the sun's vigilance lozenges hope knows the climate of her own burning? Winner of the Gribble Press Chapbook Competition for 2011
Walking on Water
Thomas' superbly crafted lines are profoundly humane and masterfully arranged. Walking on Water is an excellent collection. Leah Maines |
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