Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The King's Touch: Poems

The King's Touch: Poems

Sleigh, Tom

Paperback

General Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1644450771
ISBN13: 9781644450772
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: Feb 1 2022
Pages: 112
Weight: 0.45
Height: 0.50 Width: 6.40 Depth: 9.30
Language: English

A profound encounter with the hyperreality of our time of global upheaval, violence, and pandemic.

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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