FOMITE

Praise

“Lacrimae rerum” wrote Virgil, pointing to the tears at the heart of everything. Susan Thomas has assembled a twenty-first century portfolio in support of that ancient insight. “We are all swimmers,” she writes, “in the river of Grief.” As that river flows on in these poems, we also find flashes of tenderness and profound empathic imagination, and above all a capacity to endure and to find ways to become more than the sum of our sorrow, anger, disappointment, and fear. As these finely-crafted lyric poems teach us, that capacity deepens us, and is what in another time we might have called the soul. 

—Fred Marchant, author of Said Not Said 

“Thomas's "museum" is not a place where sadness can be safely contemplated from an aesthetic distance. Her museum's doors are wide open. In poem after risky poem, with humor, flair, and compassion, she pits the power of redemptive art against the ills and evils of the world.” 

– Philip Fried

About the Author

Susan Thomas has two chapbooks, and is a co-translator of Last Voyage, a collection of Giovanni Pascoli’s selected poems, (Red Hen Press, 2010). She has recent and forthcoming work in Manhattan Review, CUTTHROAT, and the anthology The Heart’s Many Doors (Wings Press, 2017). She lives with her husband, writer Peter Sills, mostly in New York City and sometimes in Marshfield, VT.