Letters to a Stranger

Thomas James’s Letters to a Stranger –originally published in 1973, shortly before James’s suicide–has become one of the underground classics of contemporary poetry. In this new edition, with an introduction by Lucie Brock-Broido and thirteen of James’s poems never before published in book form, this fraught and moving masterpiece is at last available.

Letters to a Stranger is a new book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, edited by Mark Doty, dedicated to bringing essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print.

“Letters to a Stranger is a book of dark intensities and deeply felt connections, both haunted and haunting, at once brooding, sensual and lucid . . . The voice in these poems–painfully lonely and filled with longing, estranged and religious–has stayed with me for more than twenty years. It deserves to be remembered.”

“Thomas James (1946-1947) published only one book in his lifetime. Letters to a Stranger—lush and stark at once, cool and fierce, drunk on thhe dark allure of Plath’s Ariel but distinctly its own, Gothic original—was little acknowledged upon publication. But James has quietly haunted the conversation of American poetry for more than thirty years. Now this legendary book returns, here with thirteen uncollected poems and and a riveting introduction by Lucie Brock-Broido that is itself an urgent missive “to a stranger”—a love letter, a biography and exorcism all at once.