Chosen - Paperback

by Toni Thomas (Author)

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

Author Biography

Toni Thomas' poems have been published in literary magazines in Austria, New Zealand, Canada, England, Scotland, and Australia. In the United States, her work has appeared in over fifty literary magazines, including Prairie Schooner, North Dakota Quarterly, Hayden's Ferry Review, the Minnesota Review, Weber - The Contemporary West, Rhino, Notre Dame Review, and Poetry East. She has received Atlanta Review's International Merit Award and an Ann Stanford Poetry Prize from the Southern California Review. Her poems have twice been nominated by literary magazines for a Pushcart Prize. Her first chapbook, Walking on Water, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her second chapbook, Fast as Lightning, won the 2010 Gribble Press Poetry Competition. Chosen was a finalist in the 2010 Brick Road Poetry Press competition. Recently two additional full length manuscripts were finalists for the Anhinga Poetry Prize, the May Swenson Poetry Award, and the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize. She lives in Oregon with her children and likes to contemplate the moon from her bed.