Carnegie Mellon University Press

Robert Thomas knows what a frenulum is, and the skills a shoemaker needed in 1623. His range of reference and imagery is wide, including music (classical and popular), history, and the hard sciences, and from these he makes poems unlike anyone else’s. He can be lyrically contemporary, or speak in extended narratives through the personae of Leoš Janácek, Jakob Boehme, and Jacqueline du Pré. Dragging the Lake is richly textured, various, deeply satisfying, and snazzy.

Winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize
Fordham University Press

Robert Thomas’s Door to Door beckons the reader to enter worlds of surprising poignancy in a time of the cultivated glib. The imagery is original and surefooted, and the book’s pacing is almost mathematical, moving with controlled ease. Realism and surrealism merge in some of Thomas’s most striking poems, where two or more worlds collide softly—a tableau of twists and turns that always bring the reader to a door where one is invited to see oneself.