All That Once Was You by Thomas Griffin

In poems filled with delicately nuanced music (“intoxicated moths,” “the puckered lake relaxes,” “every tree’s leaves knuckled down”), Thomas Griffin holds out an almost Keatsian hand to us. Even as we feel its warmth draining, we’re buoyed by moments of fresh observation and beauty (“the grasses sigh in the warm hands / of the evening breeze” or “the clouds grow more themselves / and fill their pockets with snow”). Whether elegiac or urgent, each poem is a momentary stay of execution, even as we are “winging through this darkness” and eventually “will die from / everything [we] hold onto.” This wonderful first collection comes to us, open-palmed and alive.

–Kate Gleason, author of Measuring the Dark (First Book Award, Zone 3 Press) and Reading Darwin While My Father Dies (Anabiosis Press).