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Book Title

The King's Touch

Subtitle
Poems
Author 1
Tom Sleigh
Poem Excerpt
No drip line to uncrimp, no one needing
to intubate the moon or hold the little plastic basin
to the sky’s lips. “The sun is an insult,” wrote one.

Millions on millions of stacked-up rooms
where screens become a hive mind
thinking it, seeing it, saying it over and over again.

—from “Little Testament”
Body
Tom Sleigh’s poems are skeptical of the inevitability of our fate, but in this brilliant new collection, they are charged with a powerful sense of premonition, as if the future is unfolding before us, demanding something greater than the self. Justice is a prevailing force, even while the poems are fully cognizant of the refugee crisis, war, famine, and the brutal reality of a crowded hospital morgue.
           
The King’s Touch collides the world of fact and the world of mystery with a resolutely secular register. The title poem refers to the once-held belief that the king, as a divine representative, is imbued with the power of healing touch. Sleigh turns this encounter between illness and human contact toward his own chronic blood disease and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its mounting death tolls. One poem asks, “isn’t it true that no matter how long you / wear them, masks don’t grieve, only faces do?”
           
In this essential new work, Sleigh shows how the language of poetry itself can revive and recuperate a sense of a future under the conditions of violence, social unrest, and global anxiety about the fate of the planet.

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List Price
$16.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-64445-077-2
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
112
Trim Size
Trim Size
6.5 x 9
Keynote
A profound encounter with the hyperreality of our time of global upheaval, violence, and pandemic.

About the Author

Tom  Sleigh
Credit: Annette Hornischer
Tom Sleigh is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently House of Fact, House of Ruin; Station Zed; Army Cats; and Space Walk, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He is also the author of two essay collections, The Land between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees and Interview with a Ghost. Sleigh teaches at Hunter College and lives in New York.

http://www.tomsleigh.com/
 
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Upcoming Events

Paterson Poetry Prize winner Tom Sleigh reading from THE KING'S TOUCH at the Poetry Center at Passaic Community College

Date:
Location:
Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJview map
Location: Hamilton Club. With fellow Paterson Poetry Prize winner Joshua Bennett. Click here for more details

Tom Sleigh (THE KING'S TOUCH) reading and in conversation with Phil Klay as part of the Inspired Writers Series at Fairfield University

Date:
Location:
Fairfield University in Fairfield, CTview map
This event is free and open to the public. Click here for more details and to register

Tom Sleigh (THE KING'S TOUCH) reading and in conversation with Daniel Lawless at Hudson Valley Writers Center

Date:
Location:
Hudson Valley Writers' Center in Sleepy Hollow, NYview map
Hosted by Sally Bliumis Dunn and Estha Weiner. This event is free and open to the public, with optional donation. Click here for more details and to register

Praise

  • “Generous, meticulous, haunted and grounded, The King’s Touch handles contemporary life with alertness and compassion. . . . Reading The King’s Touch is an extraordinary pleasure not to be missed.”—Joyce Peseroff, Arrowsmith 
  • “A book of urgent consciousness. . . . 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, Consequence Forum 
     
     
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