The Thomas Salto

"These poems are in some sense unimaginable. They seem inscribed with a strange light as if at a weird angle. This is the real world, dingy, backlit and heartbreaking, and it is also a world where words can cut the world in half and give it back to itself but rarefied this time, now uneasy and beautiful and strange. You have never read poems that work like these, in their internal architecture and it’s breaking, between private and public, between world and… something else; Stevens and Oppen would weep— Straw writes and if you write the poem you kindly / here or cruelly there can trace / the shadows of the netting / as it falls on people, animals, and things.” This is exactly what they do in this work, with a skillful ear, care, and brilliance." ~Cody-Rose Clevidence

"Has our species ever been more in need of new ways of thinking through our relation to the real, to the simulated, to each other? With a visionary attention to the lived sensorium of the present and its historical givens, The Thomas Salto reveals a brilliantly nuanced view of individual agency in the age of falling empires. If the future is survivable, this is what its poetry sounds like." ~Elizabeth Willis

"Musical and graceful like Super 8 movies of Victorian poetry, disjunctive and modern in its strange contiguities, Timmy Straw’s The Thomas Salto employs great verbal precision to formulate sensations and perceptions, many of which give address to 1980s America and its inheritors. In these beautiful, intelligent poems, this is how from time to time we find / a question to clear our answers for a time." ~Eugene Ostashevsky