Chosen - Toni Thomas

A Note on Toni Thomas' Chosen These are poems of "that day-" when "the fiction lifted," poems of "ecclesiastical life burning / sweet on the bread sticks," these are narratives and portraits that "buy happiness / with a steel wick / crowbar it to an unyielding clothesline" so that September can come "with its thrifty tongue." And so the lyric opens, and "hemlines' perfect luminaries are bleeding." And we learn that "All the world's a crock of shattered Blue Danube," but "anyone can stand up resolute / in a tail wind with enough grace." I opened this book on the poem "An Arc of Chintz Floats," and I loved it, loved those "sun damaged men" and "rigging of sails" and "holiness" which "invades the courtyard." You whisper in my ear, the author says, and "the hem of my dress keeps lengthening." Many poems to admire here-I recommend "History Lesson," "The Perilous Undertakings of the Everyday World," "I Call Midnight," among others-these poems are Toni Thomas' prayers, her psalms. The reality exists in memory alone, Proust tells us, and this book of Chosen moments, chosen from many other moments of our time, stands up for that notion. -Ilya Kaminsky