The Valise (available January 2012)
Poems by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino
$12
“Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino writes with a philosopher’s precision. Perhaps he is a refugee from paradox, finding asylum in these two-line stanzas so spare and direct. Fastidious in gathering particulars he makes statements when statements are needed and knows the time and place for fragments. This, this and this: these poems are a lesson in ostensive definition. What St. Thomasino keeps in his valise calls out in a restrained but singular voice for undivided attention.”
—Alan Halsey
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“The pleasure of this poetry is the pleasure of its openness both to experience and to language.”
—Jack Foley, from the Foreword
“Thus are knowledge and experience forced to show their metaphysical hand and thereby reveal hidden eidetic structures within the poems’ gaming motifs . . . all this somehow becomes art of a most singular and profound beauty.”
—Carey Scott Wilkerson, from the Foreword
The Tragedy in My Neighborhood
AVAILABLE NOW! (free shipping when you order it from us)
First you show up for the poetry reading and then you are at
the reading except you are in your living room reading a book, and that’s The Tragedy in My Neighborhood – it’s
Ken Cormier you’re reading, but it sounds like he’s reading to you. The active
part of the poem is coming over to you, performing, projecting, gallivanting,
whispering, making raucous and yahoo. Only Ken Cormier situates the poem on a
road map, plants it in a garden, launches it into space orbit. His poems don’t
sit there –ensconced in prose settings, they race off to heaven, demand
payback, take you for a ride in a convertible. No one else does what Ken
Cormier does – set the poem free to the Infinite, knowing that it will always
return, home, striking gold in them thar hearts.
- Bob Holman
Like adding facets to a
diamond, Ken Cormier’s talent becomes more brilliant with every new work. With
his tongue lodged firmly in his cheek, Ken tackles everyday America with the
right combination of weirdness and compassion. His protagonists face the disappointments
of life and he handles them with a tenderness usually reserved for babies and
small animals. Around their bright bleeding spotlight lurks powder-soft
blackness. In this collection, stories ease their narrative between poems of
startling surrealistic lucidity laced with heartbreaking truths.
– Jill Battson
About the Author:
Ken Cormier is a teacher, performance poet, independent radio producer, and musician. He is the author of
Balance Act, a book of poems and stories published by Insomniac Press. His stories and poems have appeared in a number of national journals, and his radiophonic works have been aired on public radio stations around the US. Ken co-founded and edited
The Lumberyard: A Radio Magazine of Poetry Prose
and Music, which aired weekly on WHUS in Connecticut from 2005-2008. His third CD of original songs,
Nowhere Is Nowhere, was released in 2009 by Cosmodemonic Telegraph Records.
