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Tom Sleigh

Tom Sleigh’s many books include the 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize winner, The King’s Touch, House of Fact, House of Ruin, Station Zed, and Army Cats, all from Graywolf Press. His most recent book of essays is The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing In an Age of Refugees, which recounts his time as a journalist in the Middle East and East Africa. His awards include a Guggenheim, two NEA grants, Kingsley Tufts Award, Shelley Memorial Award, and both the Updike Award and Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Threepenny, Poetry, and many other magazines. He has both a memoir and a new and selected poems forthcoming. A Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, he lives in Brooklyn, NY.

 

  • Phone Call: Lesson in Style and The Story of Civilization

    “Everything feels all swollen and puffy, like my brain

  • Portrait of My Father as a Snake

    I was dead. The hospital around me

  • Old Man Swimming

    When the Old Man of the Sea shapeshifting on the bottom

  • Code

    At last it's just me and the alphabet.

  • The Drowned and the Saved

    If all of us were to try to kill ourselves at least once, then all of us would know nothing more than that: which is why

  • Proof of Poetry

    I wanted first to end up as a drunk in the gutter

  • Stairway

    In those days, so many stairways were said to lead to happiness, mainly of a sexual kind—and as I climbed those

  • Seventh Circle

    And after the fight the moment of awakening

  • From the Ass’s Mouth: A Theory of the Leisure Class

    Up on stage in the three-quarters empty auditorium,