“Sleigh’s reviewers use words such as ‘adept,’ ‘elegant,’ and ‘classical.’ Reading his new book, I find all those terms beside the point…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.”
Tom Sleigh
Tom Sleigh is an award-winning poet and translator. His latest work, Station Zed (2015), won praise from the Los Angeles Times and Ploughshares. Seamus Heaney wrote that Sleigh’s poems are “hard-earned and well founded.” Sleigh’s awards include the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently program director and senior poet of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Hunter College. On February 8, 2018, Graywolf Press will publish two books by Sleigh that both take up the tensions between political convictions and political emotions as he has experienced them in writing about Syrian, Palestinian, and Somali refugees. The book of essays, THE LAND BETWEEN TWO RIVERS: WRITING IN AN AGE OF REFUGEES, and the book of poems, HOUSE OF FACT, HOUSE OF RUIN, are being published jointly because they are meant to be companion pieces.
