Space Walk

　　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 Sleigh's poems, rocket motors 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 Nietzsche," "In the face that must conceal / what is necessary / to bear / love appears in the face / of the face of what is necessary." Hailing Tom Sleigh's work, the Los Angeles Times writes that he "stakes a claim on the planet of the imagination." In The New Yorker's words, he "asserts the importance of poetry itself," showing us in Space Walk its restorative, recuperative powers.