A note from Tom Sleigh:
The poems have pushed me toward an emotional directness and urgency which I hope gets at the heart of our strangely surreal moment, and the potentially apocalyptic future that’s opening up before us.
The title refers to the ancient belief that the divinely anointed king can lay his hands on the sick and cure them. Of course, the king I had in mind, James the VI, couldn’t stand touching the sick, but felt like he had to do it to maintain his power over the commons. I like the mixed nature of experience, the darkly humorous way that the king as a man and the king as public figure are at odds. Obviously, the poems that come out of that paradox speak to our pandemic moment in ways both direct and oblique. And the book also looks at the lives of refugees, both children and adults, and the soldiers who often determine their fate, and explores how language can and can’t adequately represent their worlds, offer solace in myths, history, and art—and hopefully, provide a provisional “clarification of life,” to quote Frost, amidst violence and chaos.
Consequence Forum
The King's Touch by Tom Sleigh, November 2022
“If poets have spheres, and I think they do, but not spheres of influence, only areas of consistency, areas of exploration, poetic powers, then Tom Sleigh writes poems that have something like the consistency of an integrated personality; they have pleasures in being well made and cognizant, in ethics and morality, and a sense of self that attempts to make sense of their conflicts. And in conflict, which is unappeasable, they find a way forward with a sense of global tragedy, and as for the generosity and beauty and intelligences we may find in the activity of our lives as writers or interpreters, all of that activity is also subject to the forces that cause or fail to ameliorate suffering as well. One fascinating poem in this regard is the six-part sequence "Readings," which collages together various anecdotes about injustice and the state-suppression of freedom. At humanity's best, we have the undeniable heroic and good activity of a Frederick Douglass, which we read about. In the end, the life of reading, which Sleigh associates with his English teacher mother, is the life of consciousness itself, a privacy, the voice in our heads, the something more basic than heroism to which Sleigh pays his ultimate homage.”
-David Blair
https://www.consequenceforum.org/reviews/the-kings-touch-by-tom-sleigh
Arrowsmith Press
On Tom Sleigh’s The King’s Touch, February 2022
“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
Michigan Quarterly Review
The Laying of Hands: Tom Sleigh’s The King’s Touch, February 2022
“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