Space Walk

By Tom Sleigh

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0547085990
• ISBN13: 9780547085999
• Release Date: August 2008
• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

A fine book of new poetry

Tom Sleigh is one of the best poets today. This is a book of great emotional power, one that examines, in an understated way, the primal experiences of being part of an aggressive, weightless nation, as well as the releases into the weightlessness of smaller scaled losses. He is a poet who balances the claims of other people, intellectual and emotional responsibility, against the delights of art. There are poems here that ride with seeming effortlessness upon cunning Metaphysical turns--a smiling quality. And he is the master of the extended sequence poems, in poems like "Ice Trucker Pilgrimage: A Libretto." He has discovered something new and inherently theatrical in the form of the sequence in his work. I would read this together with "The Far Side of the Earth," and seek out "Bula Matari/Smasher of Rocks," another "theater piece" sequence of his that appeared in a short-lived journal of longer poems called "At Length" and also as a chapbook.