Graywolf Press and Tom Sleigh present:

Age of Wonder: Poems from The King’s Touch

 
 
 

Every Tuesday in the run-up to publication on February 1st, 2022, a poem from The King’s Touch has been featured.

 

Praise For “The King’s Touch”

“Generous, meticulous, haunted and grounded, ‘The King’s Touch’ handles contemporary life with alertness and compassion for a world in which ‘A Man Plays Debussy for a Blind, Eighty-Four-Year-Old Female Elephant’ while friends kill themselves and voices urge, ‘You’re better off dead, you useless piece of shit.’ The piano player ‘shuts his eyes and leans his forehead against hers,’ Sleigh imagines; ‘it’s like each one’s/listening to what the other one’s thinking.’ Sleigh’s business, like Dickinson’s, is circumference; though he can’t erase the voices that drive individuals and nations mad, they can be subsumed in music. Reading ‘The King’s Touch’ is an extraordinary pleasure not to be missed. ”
— Joyce Peseroff, Arrowsmith Press
“The conflict poems (for lack of a better term) are invariably gripping, especially when they involve the speaker learning how to use a rocket-propelled grenade, as in ‘Practice Range.’ And, as if an RPG poem isn’t heavy enough on its own, Sleigh’s decision to reveal, via a note below the poem’s title, that ‘Practice Range’ takes place in Erbil, Kurdistan lends the poem additional significance…In ‘The King’s Touch,’ Sleigh excels at seeing and interpreting the world as it is, on its own merits. It’s a fine addition to his ever-longer body of work.”
— Kevin O’Rourke, Michigan Quarterly Review

“Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well-founded. I greatly admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.” 

—Seamus Heaney

“Sleigh's reviewers use words such as 'adept,' 'elegant,' and 'classical.' Reading his new book, I find all those terms beside the point, even though not one is inaccurate. I am struck by the human dramas that are enacted in these poems, the deep encounters that often shatter the participants and occasionally restore them. What delights me most is seeing a poet of his accomplishments and his large and well-earned reputation suddenly veer into a new arena of both our daily and our mythical lives. For the writer, such daring may be its own reward; for the reader, it is thrilling to overhear a writer pushing into greatness.”

—Ploughshares, Philip Levine