SPECIAL MENTION
THE NEW YORK TIMES: The Poems That Poets Turn to in a Time of Strife
Sixteen poets tell us about the verses and books they are reading, or that they hope others seek out.
ARTHUR SZE
I’m reading “House of Fact, House of Ruin,” by Tom Sleigh. In these poems Tom Sleigh draws on his experience working as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa, confronting various forms of trauma without averting his gaze. His complex, disturbing vision and poetic mastery make this book an arresting read.
Arthur Sze is the author, most recently, of “Sight Lines,” which won the 2019 National Book Award for poetry.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/books/poetry-poets-recommendations.html
The New York Times Book Review
A Traveler to Troubled Lands, Called to Bear Witness
“Sleigh is a deliberate traveler in the troubled world. . . . In Sleigh’s hands these moments of ongoingness mix something of the daily with something of the miraculous. . . . Like Whitman, Sleigh here plays with what the observer’s notebook can become. He embeds lines of poetry in journalistic essays like a rogue reporter; he’ll forge a sonnet or rhymed tercets out of reported language. . . . Sleigh’s cross-pollinating forms remind us that language, too, is always being deployed to some purpose.”
-Tess Taylor
Washington Independent Review of Books
February 2018 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri
"Sleigh reveals that 'fact' and 'ruin' are the same, as much as we’d like to believe our little mortality is a real commodity. He takes meaning to its extreme, pushing logic to become philosophy — taking the rough stuff of this earth, rolling it around in his hands and then letting us know just what it’s worth....Poetry is Sleigh’s task here and he’s one of a handful of writers today upholding the brightest part of our canon....Sleigh makes poetry go beyond itself. Like Wallace Stevens there’s an imperative beneath the line, words as a consequence of fine-grained thought."
-Grace Cavalieri
The New York Times
T Magazine
Inside the Season’s New Books
February 13, 2018
The artist Celeste Dupuy-Spencer interprets what’s happening on Page 76 of newly published or upcoming titles. Plus, a few other releases on our radar.
House of Fact, House of Ruin
Poems by Tom Sleigh
And what my freedom gave me
on the far side of the plains were mountains that salt flats
led away from to my promised land of Raymond Chandler,
the total marine darkness between each little beach town
on Highway 101 before the sullen phosphorus
of the cruise ship casino three miles beyond the harbor.
With these poems, Sleigh travels from battlefields ranging in location from Baghdad to Brooklyn’s projects, interrogating the increasingly shaky notion of truth and the extent to which the work of artists (Piero della Francesca, Jimi Hendrix) might offer some redemption. “Autobiography,” quoted above, was partly inspired by Raymond Chandler’s 1940 detective novel “Farewell, My Lovely.” Published by Graywolf Press on Feb. 6.
Publishers Weekly
February 5, 2018
“Sleigh (Station Zed) blurs the boundary between art and artifact as he lyrically documents war zones in Libya, Iraq, and Syria in this 10th poetry collection, released concurrently with The Land Between Two Rivers, a new book of essays. He performs feats of empathy in attempting to witness torture from the perspectives of the tortured (‘smooth barrels of their AKs press into my back// and against my chest’) and the torturer (‘if infantry brings/ you a guy you think is shooting mortars, scaring/ him with a muzzled dog doesn’t seem like the worst trick./ I was willing to try it. I didn’t know it wasn’t going to work’). Accounts of violence do not spare the reader any of the details or questions that might occur to an eyewitness. ‘What do you know about atrocity?/ the scream of the frozen open mouth showing gold fillings in the molars,’ Sleigh writes. He also references Biblical narratives without much hope that Jesus (who he refers to as ‘what’s his name’) or God (who is addressed as ‘OMG’) can provide more solace than any of the literary figures, including Phillip Levine and Mark Strand, whom he conjures in several poems written in memoriam. Sleigh brings readers close to trauma with a lyrical treatment from which one wants to turn but cannot.”
Booklist
January 31, 2018
“The poems of Sleigh’s generous new collection are placed in two parts of three sections each. The parts have prefatory poems that evoke the poems’ frequent setting in the Arabic and Islamic world and exemplify Sleigh’s procedure. Called ‘Three Wishes’ and ‘Genie,’ respectively, the prefatory poems shift from the descriptive to the reflective, analytic, or explanatory in a manner not always strictly logical but always imaginatively convincing. Other poems probe violent contemporary scenes in Benghazi, Baghdad, the Golan Heights, the Iraqi desert, Paris, and Brooklyn, or portray apologists (‘Propaganda,’ based on an interview with ‘the Syrian Minister of Expatriates’) and executants (‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’) of such violence. Sleigh has been to the places and talked with the people of his poems—which aren’t all about conflict but include penetrating elegies, autobiographical bits, ruminations about animals, and more—and he knows the literary bases of the West well, especially Homer and the sonnet (a customary form for him, customarily half-rhymed). Thus informed, his poems range centuries and plumb the mysteries of human inconsistency with haunting forcefulness.”
-Ray Olson
Signature
The 19 Best Poetry Books to Read in the New Year
January 29, 2018
By Lorraine Berry
House of Fact, House of Ruin
Tom Sleigh
Is this what our love requires—to be embarrassed
but not embarrassed by how unlovely
or needy or gauche our bodies are?
Tom Sleigh has translated Herakles from the Greek, and previously published nine volumes of poetry. In House of Fact, House of Ruin, Sleigh devotes the first section to American experiences in the Middle East during the decade-plus of American-involved war. Whether interpreting the words of the officer who wonders the cost of participating in enhanced interrogation, or the voice of a soldier waiting to go into battle, Sleigh carries readers into the thick of it. In an adjoining section, Sleigh vilifies the lives of those countries’ inhabitants, the militia member who remembers the smoking cigarettes of lost comrades. Later poems find subjects in Long Island, in shopping malls, and in shanty towns in east Africa.
The Millions
February 2, 2018
"Sleigh’s new poetry collection is informed by his reporting on the lives of refugees, but it is instructive to see the difference between his modes of writing and seeing. . . . What Sleigh helps us see in these poems is something deeper than journalism can offer: a heart and mind torn by inhabiting a world but not fully grasping its pain."
-Nick Ripatrazone
https://themillions.com/2018/02/must-read-poetry-february-2018.html
Literati Bookstore
Ann Arbor, MI
“With his previously published collections such as Station Zed and Army Cats, one might easily assume that Tom Sleigh would face great difficulty when attempting to produce an even more intriguing and sonically appetizing collection. House of Fact, House of Ruin, Sleigh’s latest collection, accomplishes this task in addition to much, much more. Through his narrative tracts and winding, nearly symphonic syntax, Sleigh is able to slow down the momentum of contemporary tragedy, making such things as war, torture, death, and Western society’s incessant need to forcibly interact with others, completely viewable. Free in both its formal boundaries and its desires to amplify the liminal space of transition—from the literal into the fictive along with the fictive into the literal—this collection attacks the dilemmas of our present times—alternative facts, entrenched rhetoric, and displacing news cycles—with a sobering audacity. Sleigh mitigates normalcy by taking his audience on an unnaturally complicated ride: with each poem comes a new location and an even newer—peculiar—sensation.”
-Bennet Johnson