Space Walk (Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award)

Space Walk blasts off into realms of experience that show the imagination’s limitless capacity to be both brutal and uplifting. While many of the poems in this daring collection confront head-on our current American realities of empire, state violence, the endless “crisis-chatter” of talking heads, and the eerie, weightless feeling of impending catastrophe, they are tethered to the gravitational pull of love and hope.

In Tom Sleigh’s poems, rocket engines and pancake houses, space stations and mom’s kitchen, terrorist organizations and Sundays in a museum are all part of love’s intergalactic amplitude. As the poet writes in “After Netzsche”: “In the face that must conceal / what is necessary / to bear / love appears in the face / of the face of what is necessary.”