The AK wants to tell a different truth—a truth ungarbled that is so obviousno one could possibly mistake its meaning.If you look down the cyclops-eye of the barrelwhat you''ll see is a boy with trousersrolled above his ankles.You''ll see a mouth of bone moving in syllablesthat have the rapid-fire clarityof a weapon that can fire 600 rounds a minute. —from "Oracle"Station Zed is the terminal outpost beyond which is the unknown. It is also the poet Tom Sleigh''s finest work. In this latest collection, Sleigh brings to these poems his experiences as a journalist on tours of Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, and Libya. But these are also dispatches from places of grief, history, and poetic traditions as varied as Scottish ballads and the journeys of Basho.

Essays on the urgency of our global refugee crisis and our capacity as artists and citizens to confront itTom Sleigh describes himself donning a flak jacket and helmet, working as a journalist inside militarized war zones and refugee camps, as “a sort of Rambo Jr.” With self-deprecation and empathetic humor, these essays recount his experiences during several tours in Africa and in the Middle Eastern region once called Mesopotamia, “the land between two rivers.” Sleigh asks three central questions: What did I see? How could I write about it? Why did I write about it? The first essays in The Land between Two Rivers focus on the lives of refugees in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia, and Iraq. Under the conditions of military occupation, famine, and war, their stories can be harrowing, even desperate, but they’re also laced with wily humor and an undeluded hopefulness, their lives having little to do with their depictions in mass media. The second part of the book explores how writing might be capable of honoring the texture of these individuals’ experiences while remaining faithful to political emotions, rather than political convictions. Sleigh examines the works of Anna Akhmatova, Mahmoud Darwish, Ashur Etwebi, David Jones, Tomas Tranströmer, and others as guiding spirits. The final essays meditate on youth, restlessness, illness, and Sleigh’s motivations for writing his own experiences in order to move out into the world, concluding with a beautiful remembrance of Sleigh''s friendship with Seamus Heaney.

Tom Sleigh’s brilliant new collection is “full of the wonder and eloquence driving profound poetry” (Los Angeles Times)You’ve got to put your pants on in the house of fact.And in the house of fact, when you take off your shirt,you can hear your shirt cry out, Facts are the floor, factsare how you make the right side talk to the left.I’m washing my naked belly clean, and doing it with dignity.I’m turning around, trying to see the filthinessthat keeps making me filthy.—from “House of Fact, House of Ruin”“I hate to admit it, but even the house of fact is a house of ruin,” writes Tom Sleigh in the title sequence of this extraordinary new collection. Very much of our present moment, in which fact can so easily be manufactured and ruin so easily achieved by pressing "Send" or pulling a trigger, these poems range across the landscapes of contemporary experience. Whether a militia in Libya or a military base in Baghdad, a shantytown in East Africa or an opulent mall on Long Island, these subjects and locations resonate with the psychic and social costs of having let the genie of war, famine, and climate change out of the lamp in the first place. The book ultimately turns on conundrums of selfhood and self-estrangement in which Sleigh urges us toward a different realm, where we might achieve the freedom of spirit to step outside our own circumstances, however imperfectly, and look at ourselves as other, as unfamiliar, as strange. House of Fact, House of Ruin is Sleigh’s most engaging and virtuosic collection to date.

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.

The AK wants to tell a different truth—a truth ungarbled that is so obviousno one could possibly mistake its meaning.If you look down the cyclops-eye of the barrelwhat you''ll see is a boy with trousersrolled above his ankles.You''ll see a mouth of bone moving in syllablesthat have the rapid-fire clarityof a weapon that can fire 600 rounds a minute. —from "Oracle"Station Zed is the terminal outpost beyond which is the unknown. It is also the poet Tom Sleigh''s finest work. In this latest collection, Sleigh brings to these poems his experiences as a journalist on tours of Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, and Libya. But these are also dispatches from places of grief, history, and poetic traditions as varied as Scottish ballads and the journeys of Basho.

Essays on the urgency of our global refugee crisis and our capacity as artists and citizens to confront itTom Sleigh describes himself donning a flak jacket and helmet, working as a journalist inside militarized war zones and refugee camps, as “a sort of Rambo Jr.” With self-deprecation and empathetic humor, these essays recount his experiences during several tours in Africa and in the Middle Eastern region once called Mesopotamia, “the land between two rivers.” Sleigh asks three central questions: What did I see? How could I write about it? Why did I write about it? The first essays in The Land between Two Rivers focus on the lives of refugees in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia, and Iraq. Under the conditions of military occupation, famine, and war, their stories can be harrowing, even desperate, but they’re also laced with wily humor and an undeluded hopefulness, their lives having little to do with their depictions in mass media. The second part of the book explores how writing might be capable of honoring the texture of these individuals’ experiences while remaining faithful to political emotions, rather than political convictions. Sleigh examines the works of Anna Akhmatova, Mahmoud Darwish, Ashur Etwebi, David Jones, Tomas Tranströmer, and others as guiding spirits. The final essays meditate on youth, restlessness, illness, and Sleigh’s motivations for writing his own experiences in order to move out into the world, concluding with a beautiful remembrance of Sleigh''s friendship with Seamus Heaney.

Tom Sleigh’s brilliant new collection is “full of the wonder and eloquence driving profound poetry” (Los Angeles Times)You’ve got to put your pants on in the house of fact.And in the house of fact, when you take off your shirt,you can hear your shirt cry out, Facts are the floor, factsare how you make the right side talk to the left.I’m washing my naked belly clean, and doing it with dignity.I’m turning around, trying to see the filthinessthat keeps making me filthy.—from “House of Fact, House of Ruin”“I hate to admit it, but even the house of fact is a house of ruin,” writes Tom Sleigh in the title sequence of this extraordinary new collection. Very much of our present moment, in which fact can so easily be manufactured and ruin so easily achieved by pressing "Send" or pulling a trigger, these poems range across the landscapes of contemporary experience. Whether a militia in Libya or a military base in Baghdad, a shantytown in East Africa or an opulent mall on Long Island, these subjects and locations resonate with the psychic and social costs of having let the genie of war, famine, and climate change out of the lamp in the first place. The book ultimately turns on conundrums of selfhood and self-estrangement in which Sleigh urges us toward a different realm, where we might achieve the freedom of spirit to step outside our own circumstances, however imperfectly, and look at ourselves as other, as unfamiliar, as strange. House of Fact, House of Ruin is Sleigh’s most engaging and virtuosic collection to date.

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.