"Tomas Morin's poems are as infectious and spooky and darkly humorous as the Brothers Grimm, as shapely and colloquial and eloquent as John Donne, and as skeptical and addicted to history-as-fable as Zbigniew Herbert."--Tom Sleigh, from the introduction

"An energetic and moving book of fantasias and elegies."--Edward Hirsch

Selected from over one thousand manuscripts for the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Tomas Q. Morin's debut is rich with the mastery of Morin's lush storytelling. From war-torn images of Eastern Europe in the mid-1900s to modern-day glimpses of the American southwest, these poems are bold and brightly imagined.

From "Castrato":

"What do you call a gifted soprano
with no balls who is too ugly
to play the heroine, is never tall enough
for the role of the hero? Wait a quarter century
and you can fast forward past the floggings,
the endless sermons, the giggles under alders
with curious girls, busted noses, carped
sisters with chubby boys, the innumerable
nights of sleeplessness. Better to skip all this
unpleasantness and descend the last rise
toward the coast where you can stroll the docks
in the short light of winter, get lost
in the cloudbank, let the sea ripen
in your hair, scan the flat water
for the handsome young men . . ."

Tomas Q. Morin was born in Texas and educated at Texas State University and Johns Hopkins University. He lives in San Marcos, Texas, and teaches at Texas State University.

"After One" and "Waking" established Tom Sleigh as one of the most original and accomplished poets in contemporary America. In "The Chain," Sleigh explores the nature of memory--its uncanny ability to recast events in contradictory ways as it links individual lives to history. The poet reveals the ways in which the individual consciousness, alternately resisting and embracing its ancestral legacy, seeks to transform, in order to comprehend, the meaning of cultural inheritance. In a series of elegies, portraits, and love poems, he movingly dramatizes the ambiguous nature of truth and the difficulties the moral imagination must overcome in recalling, understanding, and judging the past. The publication of "The Chain" confirms Tom Sleigh's place among the most imaginative, unpredictable, and formally sophisticated poets of his generation.
"Tom Sleigh's precision marks him as the diamond cutter of poetry; his verse has a tense musicality, and his ability to convey exact emotions, even the state of consciousness itself, is unerring."--"The New York Times Book Review," Notable Books of the Year, 1990-1991

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.

Widely considered one of the finest poets of his generation, Tom Sleigh brings to his fifth collection his trademark intensity and craftsmanship, mixing the streetwise edginess of popular culture with Greek and Latin references, myth, and dramatic lyrics. Passionately comprehensive in its understanding of contemporary reality, Far Side of the Earth is unique in its moral gravitas, consolatory power, and strangeness of vision.