HERE AND OTHER NOTIONS, poetry by Thomas Zemsky

Publication Date: August 15, 2023

Paperback, 70 pages

ISBN: 978-1-956782-44-8

$29.50 retail, $20.00 from publisher

In this fourth collection from poet Thomas Zemsky, he devotes attention to aurality, to the sounds of his words and described by his words, along with the silences among them, all while maintaining his signature primacy of metaphor. Thus in his opening poem “Rain” we encounter “the sparrow / who drives the train / past the graveyard” – such a plentitude of sound and quiet suggested in so brief a phrase – and a few lines later he writes of the rain pasting “the bright wrappers of autumn / on the much trodden flesh of the day,” an image it’s hard to imagine anyone but Zemsky conjuring. The “monaural rain” recurs in “The Music Man” along with “a dog/train dialogue / early every morning,” a sound-drenched world to which “I can’t stop not listening.” His cat makes an appearance, as does his love of jazz, along with a host of other birds and trains and poets and war and even a “cockroach with a machine gun.” In his poem “To the Publishing Industry,” he notes “the day continues to be issued / in an edition of one / that goes unread” – except that’s not quite true, because Zemsky has read it, and reads it to us with all its sound, and silence.

Praise for Thomas Zemsky & Here

“And when I pay attention,” writes Yeats, “I must go out and walk / Among the dogs and horses that understand my talk.” In Here, Thomas Zemsky brings Yeats’s inter-species attention to a world that is both here and somehow just beyond human ken. Poetry, Zemsky asserts, is metaphor. But the metaphors exploding from Here are not just eyecatchers or sleight of hand. Zemsky doesn’t deal in mere comparison; Here yields to the unseen—and sometimes absurd—connectedness of all things, pulsing with metaphors that knit the cosmic and infinitesimal. Zemsky’s palate is “blue as starlight / fanned with a hummingbird’s wing.” His kaleidoscopic vision reveals “snow / that releases a dragon’s breath / when you hold it” alongside “an art deco coffin / heater on the / moon” and “the white depths of a blue / inch.” Nor is this psychic remapping limited to the quotidian. In imaginative encounters with Joyce, Angelou, Poe, Melville, Villon, and other luminaries, Here invokes distances of time and place. Physicists say that if an atom swelled to the size of earth, the nucleus would be cherry-sized and electrons still invisible. This radical displacement of scale could, I believe be deduced from the prime amorphous metaphors of Here. Experience this book, right now, right Here.

—Philip Brady, author of The Elsewhere: Poems and Poetics

About the Author

Thomas Zemsky was born in Hamilton, Ohio in 1947. He received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Since 1976 he has made his home in Lexington, Kentucky where he worked for many years for the International Book Project. Now retired, his favorite pastimes include listening to jazz on LP records, Latin American and modern literature, and movies according to the auteur theory. He believes that poetry, first and foremost, is metaphor. He is the author of three previous full-length poetry collections, After the Storm, A New School of Design, and Elephant, and his poetry has been featured in the Cincinnati Review and Sewanee Review among others.