#meetthefallauthors

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.