Search Results for “Gary Thomas”

All the Connecting Lights by Gary Thomas

All the Connecting Lights is a marvel, an homage to the unnoticed and ordinary, a tender and sweeping reckoning of childhood, nature, the mystery of epilepsy, and how our lives and memories intersect. Thomas sees nuances and symmetries that most of us don’t. I reveled in the joy of “staying lost” and the grace of “spring rationales.” I’ve been waiting for this book. It is a chronicle of wonder by a truly gifted poet.

–Lee Herrick, author of Scar and Flower

Gary Thomas’ poems range widely and feel deeply. From his childhood on a Central California peach farm to the tragic Battle of Aleppo to imagined lives and voices of others, Thomas’ poems strike chords of generosity and nostalgia and wonder and, one of his favorite words, grace. Reading these poems allows us as the readers to take part in worlds that feel at once familiar and lost to us, where Neruda and a farm woman share an unlikely birthday tea, and where we all, in reading each of these portraits of a moment in time, are able to “Gladly bear joy’s burden.”

–Gillian Wegener, author of This Sweet Haphazard

In Gary Thomas’ generous full-length collection All the Connecting Lights, his poetry traverses and pays homage to both real and imaginary landscapes—from the Great Central Valley to a peach farm outside Empire, California to castle rooms “built in the exosphere.” Striking images abound. In “Oleanders and Whoopee Cushions,” he writes, “a robin’s burst blue egg / a stiff black widow in her viscous web / earwigs belly up or ready to boil out at a touch.” These are poems that artfully document moments of the human experience, “Here abide the lost, those / abandoned to swirl among / dust motes, free range sheep, /and unused memory, / whose textures and traces / might still be familiar and felt, / if only in this moment.” Thomas’ debut collection connects the lights with poetic grace and emotional honesty.

–Maw Shein Win, author of Storage Unit for the Spirit House

The Cottage by Laurence W. Thomas

We all have a dream, an idea of heaven on earth. For Laurence Thomas the dream is of a simple idyllic life in a cabin in the woods or on a lake. In The Cottage Thomas lives out his dream through his poems and we get to live the dream with him. The poems are written with sensitivity and a special devotion to detail. The tranquil mood is reminiscent of the prose of Walden or the poetry of Gary Snyder or Wendell Berry but with Thomas’ own individual style and ear and eye for the sublime. These are poems for a rainy Saturday, poems to be read slowly and savored like perfectly aged wine, hopefully on the porch of your own cottage, real or imagined.

–David Jibson, Editor of Third Wednesday, a literary arts journal

Thomas, I think, isn’t totally honest in this chapbook. Maybe even subversive, which is in his nature and part of his charm. On the surface he takes you to a cabin by the lakeside, opening the door to nostalgia like Yeats does in “Innisfree,” walking the paths through mushrooms, listening to the sermons of maples and Virginia creeper, rowing in the moonlight, celebrating Halloween with the lake’s residents. He claims that cabin life carries him “away to places in the mind not possible to find in reality,” a theme echoed in “A Morning Walk Shows Changes” when he writes, “[O]n the breeze is a hint / of excitement as if just around the bend / or at the water’s edge I’ll find / some treasure . . . .” Look deeper though, with the artist’s eye, the poet’s eye, and you’ll find the treasures taking different forms. Quietly, sneakily, Thomas seems to be writing about poetry in a grand and disguised metaphor. He leaves footprints for you to follow in the soft lakeside landscapes that lead to valuable and hospitable moments: “Everyone is invited to visit me here and take a dip into these refreshing waters.” You can dip into the beauty that surrounds a fishing cabin, a lake, and its environs or a dip into the pleasures of word and image and craft. Thomas invites to both.

–Mark Tappmeyer, Professor of English (ret.) Southwestern Baptist University, Bolivar, Missouri

Prince of Sin City by Gary Walton

Prince of Sin City by Gary Walton $24.99, paper Gary Walton was born in Covington, Kentucky and grew up in Fort Thomas, Kentucky. He received his B.A. from Northern Kentucky University in 1981. He studied writing and publishing at the University of South Dakota and then moved to Washington D.C. where he received a Ph.D. in International Modernism… Continue Reading

Waiting for Insanity Clause by Gary Walton

“This amazing book is ironic and witty, confronting us with the ‘carnival’ of life, of ordinary people in their daily lives, who combine wonderings with the clutter of everyday and chores, as well as sudden insights, that sent tiny sparks in the growing dusk. Brief moments of joy arise in the most gloomy settings. These wonderful and highly original poems are also meditations on politics, on the fate of our planet, the stars, and on the complexity and strangeness of our lives. The book makes fun of so many aspects of our time such as the digital world as well as hope, yet hope is interwoven with our many faults. Waiting for Insanity Clause is filled with humor about our lives, yet is very philosophical, a most unusual accomplishment.”

—Marguerite G. Bouvard, author of The Unpredictability of Lightand The Invisible Wounds of War: Coming Home from Iraq and Afghanistan

Ten Counties Away by J. Todd Hawkins

This remarkable chapbook of only twenty-five poems is so variegated in both subject matter and highly demanding poetic forms that it carries the resonance of a full collection of poetry. Hawkins’s imagery scintillates with freshness and originality: “sugary stars,” “the dawn, pill-bottle orange,” “moonsick ghostcrabs,” and “the dry corn’s shriveled sigh.” Whether writing about Pecos Bill, a Jerry Bywaters masterpiece, graffiti, hurricanes, mustangs, Ghost Dancers, Blind Willie Johnson, or poignant reminiscences of childhood on a family ranch/farm, Hawkins demonstrates, time and time again, his mastery of skilled poetic craft.

–Larry D. Thomas, Member of the Texas Institute of Letters & 2008 Texas Poet Laureate

Todd Hawkins’s collection is a small treasury of unique insights, poignant love poems, and a couple of inventive combinations of prose and haiku-like epigrams. There are some very heartfelt personal poems here juxtaposing the sublimity of the human experience with the sometimes harsh reality of Texas land and seascapes. The poems are not only moving, they hold delightful surprises of language and metaphor. Hawkins is a poet who also has an admirable affinity for finding the small, little-known stories of our history, several of the eighteenth-century Southwest, to save in poems. Here is the way history should be written about, should be saved.

–Dave Parsons, 2011 Texas Poet Laureate & author of Reaching For Longer Water

From brother and sister runaways stealing a car to pole-dancing cabaret girls burned out at the end of a shift, from a one-legged tight-rope walker, doomed and falling, to rootless oil field girls, hitchhiking roadside—from the heartbreaking to the bizarre to the merely nameless—J. Todd Hawkins vividly imagines lives that drop out of memory, unremarked by historians. The images in Ten Counties Away will stun you and stay, like the evocative stillness of this passage from “Ghost Dancers”: “The prairie softly / fades in snow / lost in whiteness— / the bison also / lost, skulls clipped / clean by crows.” Drifters, con men, teenage pranksters, the bygone mustangs of Mustang Island—you’ll find them all here. And when you get to the last page, you’ll find yourself wishing for more.

–David Meischen, co-editor of Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry & co-founder of Dos Gatos Press

Search Results for: Gary Thomas