"I write about events from my life, but then they take on a life of their own, as I think about what they might suggest to others, and how I might tune up the music in them." -Cammy Thomas (Inscriptions)

Read more about Cammy Thomas and her poem "Rustle" here.

Cammy Thomas is the author of Cathedral of Wish (Four Way Books), which received the 2006 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, selected by Medbh McGuckian. Thomas’s poems have recently appeared in Appalachia, Bateau, The Classical Outlook, The Healing Muse, and Ibbetson Street Press. The recipient of a fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation, she lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, and teaches literature and creative writing at Concord Academy.

Inscriptions is available from Four Way Books. 

A meditation in the face of impermanence, Inscriptions is a book about a family in crisis. Three strong women—a mother, an aunt, and a sister-in-law—serve as focus for the collection as these compressed lyric poems wrestle with illness and “death,/ tangy as copper” and the ways in which they reshape a family. Thomas seeks consolation in what endures, discovering a sense of what’s sacred in the ordinary.

Praise for Inscriptions

“The poems of Cammy Thomas’s second collection, Inscriptions, have an emotional ferocity and lyric intensity that cut to the quick of desolating loss and fraught family legacies. ‘Air froze as they breathed it, icicles / in the lungs. They were pierced / by that which melted and left no trace,’ she writes in ‘The Emperor of Oyster Bay,’ the poem capturing in its final image the very essence of woundedness—the painful thing that leaves no trace but shapes, and makes, a life. These are poems that seek what endures beyond lack and the fragile consolations of a seemingly all-consuming world. The implacable balm Thomas offers, and the mercy, is her refusal to look away.” —Daniel Tobin

“‘All that is personal soon rots’; writes Yeats, ‘it must be packed in ice or salt.’ His words seem a fitting herald for the stark poems of Cammy Thomas’s Inscriptions—words exact, incised, cut deep—and not one word more than will suffice. In a world not made for us, the implacable is given voice in an unadorned, unerring Anglo-Saxon—written with a candor that is its own searing source of light.” —Eleanor Wilner

Read Cammy Thomas' poem, Agnus Castus, which was "Poem of the Month" for May 2014 at Old Frog Pond Farm & Studio, here.

Upcoming Readings for Cammy Thomas

Wednesday, October 15, 6 pm

Four Way Books & Friends Fall 2014 Launch Reading

Cynthia Cruz (Wunderkammer), David Dodd Lee (Animalities), Howard Levy (Spooky Action at a Distance, CavanKerry Press), Gregory Pardlo (Digest), and Cammy Thomas (Inscriptions) reading at NYU Main Bookstore (726 Broadway at Waverly) in NYC. 

Thursday, October 16, 7 pm

Four Way Books Fall 2014 Launch Reading

Cynthia Cruz (Wunderkammer), David Dodd Lee (Animalities), Gregory Pardlo (Digest), and Cammy Thomas (Inscriptions) reading at Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop (126A Front Street (next to Superfine)) in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

"...a collection that’s both mordantly funny and delightfully hopeless, as Cruz’s imagination roams between several nebenwelts (side-worlds) while indulging itself in fineries and miseries galore." Read the full review here. 

Wunderkammer is one of Four Way Books' Fall 2014 titles, which are all now available from fourwaybooks.com. 

"Guidebooks for the Dead" by Four Way Books author Cynthia Cruz is in the September 1st issue of Guernica. To read it, click here.

Yesterday, Tuesday, August 5, Gregory Pardlo's poem "Epistemology of the Phone Booth" was the poem for the Academy of American Poets' "Poem-A-Day". You can read it here.

Monday, July 21, at 6:30 pm  - Eugenia Leigh (Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows, forthcoming from Four Way Books this fall)

w/ Cathy Linh Che and Sally Wen Mao

The Honey Badgers Don’t Give A B**k Tour

Enoch Pratt Free Library Reading + Q&A

Pratt Library

400 Cathedral Street

Central Library, Poe Room

Baltimore, MD

  Tuesday, July 22, at 7 pm - Eugenia Leigh (Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows, forthcoming from Four Way Books this fall)

w/ Cathy Linh Che, Michelle Chan Brown, Sally Wen Mao, and featuring Patrick Rosal

The Honey Badgers Don’t Give A B**k Tour

Word for Word Reading Series @ Bryant Park

Bryant Park Reading Room

42nd Street side of park, between back of NYPL & Sixth Avenue; look for burgundy & white umbrellas

NYC

Free

  Wednesday, July 23, at 7 pm - Eugenia Leigh (Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows, forthcoming from Four Way Books this fall)

w/ Cathy Linh Che and Sally Wen Mao 

The Honey Badgers Don’t Give A B**k Tour

East Meets West Bookstore Reading + Open Mic

EMW

934 Massachusetts Avenue

Cambridge, MA 

  Thursday, July 24, at 5:30 pm - Eugenia Leigh (Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows, forthcoming from Four Way Books this fall)

w/ Cathy Linh Che and Sally Wen Mao

The Honey Badgers Don’t Give A B**k Tour

New Urban Arts Reading + Open Mic

New Urban Arts

705 Westminster Street

Providence, RI 

  Friday, July 25, at 8 pm - Eugenia Leigh (Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows, forthcoming from Four Way Books this fall)

w/ Cathy Linh Che, Michelle Chan Brown, and Sally Wen Mao

The Honey Badgers Don’t Give A B**k Tour

BloomBars Reading

BloomBars

3222 11th Street, NW

Washington, DC 20001

  Saturday, July 26, at 7 pm - Eugenia Leigh (Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows, forthcoming from Four Way Books this fall)

w/ Cathy Linh Che and Michelle Chan Brown

The Honey Badgers Don’t Give A B**k Tour

Petworth Citizen Reading

Petworth Citizen

829 Upshur Street, NW

Washington, DC 20001

"Eugenia Leigh's poems juxtapose the cosmic universality of human existence against the unique and personal experience of the individual. These two previously unpublished poems are in her forthcoming collection, Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, October 2014)....Each poem carries a quiet bleakness, gilded with the faintest sliver of hope."

- Karissa Chen, Fiction & Poetry Editor, Hyphen Magazine

"Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows, my first collection of poetry, will be published by Four Way Books this October. It is not the book I intended to write, but it’s the one that needed to be written." You can read more of the interview Eugenia Leigh had with Sally Wen Mao for The Best American Poetry blog as well as her poem "We Called It the Year of Birthing", and Sally Wen Mao's thoughts on it, here.