Earthen by Thomas Festa

“Brightness falls from the air,” Thomas Nashe proclaimed with wonderful pathos in an ageless lyric written 400 years ago in another time of plague.  Thomas Festa responds in this volume’s final poem—though set in a cemetery and a funeral home—with a rejuvenating apostrophe:  “You, brightness, are a world / unto yourself,” the light from which can redeem the inexorable detritus of mortality (“faded baseball caps, / mute ukuleles, empty Guinness bottles”) catalogued in these poems of love and loss.  “Observe,” he implores the reader, “the posture of oblation” even in the face of “the will of stone.”  We should observe too, along with his auspicious prosodic savvy and his exemplary dedication to economy, the poet’s resonant diction, from his splendid collection’s rich title onward.

–Stephen Yenser

In his debut chapbook, Earthen, Thomas Festa’s linguistically rich, taut poems show how the communities we create arise through acts of attention—between student and teacher, parent and child, lover and beloved. Evocative, contemplative, and often moving, Festa’s poems inhabit these moments of attention that make us both more alive and more compassionate.

–Carrie Etter