Cammy Thomas
Books
Tremors
By Cammy Thomas
Published by Four Way Books
The poems in Cammy Thomas’s wonderful collection, Tremors, individually and collectively form a coherent, insightful, and very moving arc from the wrong beginnings of a childhood marked by privilege and abuse, whose traumatic dependencies were/are only partly tempered by ambivalent love and belated understanding, to a complex, mature and at times visionary grasp of the intricacies and inextricabilities of beauty and loss, desire and separation, without either side of the equation diminishing the power (for good or ill) of the other. The artistry of the poems is part and parcel of the maturity of the poet. This is a book to live with and cherish.
—Alan Shapiro
Inscriptions
By Cammy Thomas
Published by Four Way Books
The poems of Cammy Thomas' second collection, Inscriptions, have an emotional ferocity and lyric intensity that cut to the quick of desolating loss and fraught family legacies... 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
Cathedral of Wish
By Cammy Thomas
Published by Four Way Books
Cammy Thomas's tough little lyrics revisit a childhood as if through a prism: they contain the whole, but refract it into distinct panes so we can see up close what would be too terrible intact. Their utter spareness and refusal to sentimentalize the hard facts make them both spooky and powerful. What's most moving to me is the way the child survives as a ghost inside the adult. It's as if the child has finally allowed the adult to say what was, until now, unsayable.
—Chase Twichell