Tom Holmes

Tom Holmes (Poetry) | Hattiesburg, MS

Booking Fee:

Negotiable

Will Travel:

Anywhere

Contact:

holmes_thomas_g_at_yahoo.com

Website:

http://thelinebreak.wordpress.com

Tom Holmes is the editor of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics and is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently The Cave, which won The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013. He has published over 200 poems in over 100 journals and has appeared on Verse Daily many times. His writings about wine, poetry book reviews, and poetry can be found at his blog, The Line Break: http://thelinebreak.wordpress.com/. Twitter: @TheLineBreak

Books

The Cave (Bitter Oleander Press, 2014). Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award. Poetry.
Poems for an Empty Church (Palettes & Quills Press, 2011). Poetry.
Henri, Sophie, & the Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound: Poems Blasted from the Vortex (BlazeVOX Books, 2009). Poetry.


Chapbooks


Press & Reviews

[…]Tom Holmes is explaining who we are today by stepping into our giant footprints and deciphering what it is that makes us sentient, capable of thought and therefore choice. These big question poems pose a challenge to the readers understanding of what it means to be human. It is all in here, The Cave, the start of faith, the beginning of manufacturing, of commerce. Holmes is outlining or at least providing a hypothesis for nothing less than the beginning of our conscious time on this planet. Plato is just hanging out around the corner, Holmes has his own cave and in it all is explained in time. […]
–Michael Dennis “Today’s Book of Poetry

Bitter Oleander Press puts out beautiful books and this one is not exception, its design being as handsome as the poems in Holmes’ collection in which time as a concept, time as an entity, time as the scaffolding of history, civilization, and mind itself is examined. These poems seek to unearth the artifacts of what it means to be human, not least of which are the elements that, when assembled, become something like empathy. There is a sense of social and aesthetic responsibility in these poems, a sense that Holmes’ knows the self is just another character in the story of all of us, and since it’s not the only one, there is a very present otherness, as if he knows he is responsible, accountable. For what? For seeing, certainly, for the work of that, an important theme in the collection, and witnessing.
–Laura McCullough, Editor at Mead Magazine

Tom Holmes in The Cave undertakes the ambitious project of searching the present with Paleolithic light. Just as starlight takes millennia to arrive, so understanding of the past arrives with its own light slowly through the labors of time travelers like the poet. […]
–Djelloul Marbrook, Coal Hill Review

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