A REAL LIVE BARBIE DOLL, poetry by Thomas Zemsky
Publication Date: June 1, 2024
Paperback, 72 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-72-1
Written long before the Barbie movie craze, in Thomas Zemsky’s vision his “real live / barbie doll” is twinned with fate, both of them objects “worshipped / by half / the planet” but only Barbie the one to take on (literally) the weight of the world, “every plea / and every curse” until she is left “fatter / than a harem pillow.” Who but the consummate metaphorical poet Zemsky would imagine such a strange fate for her? But that’s what he’s been doing for decades now, observing our world filled with people asking “What does it mean?” and crying “I’m going to shout / if this doesn’t make more sense” and responding with poetry that for all of its sometimes baffling wonder (for “what poetry does with time / hands can’t understand”) does help us make sense of it all. He does make an allusion to film when he describes being in the dark, trying to “believe / we’ll be around / to see / the credits running.” Even if we’re not, at least we have Zemsky’s poetry in the meantime, a harem’s pillow worth of consolation.
Praise for Thomas Zemsky
A Real Live Barbie Doll turns Thomas Zemsky’s idiosyncratic eye towards icons of beauty and meditations on grace, order, and art itself. From personified abstractions to secularly sacred totems, his poems manifest kaleidoscopic inner visions rooted in the sensory world, each line offering glimpses into his sprawling symbolic metaphysical dreamscapes where ethereal and corporeal realms intertwine. For those who revel in poetry’s power to illuminate the unseen, this writer's distinctive voice summons the cosmological imagination. While challenging at times, Zemsky’s poems ultimately reveal an embrace of life’s ambiguities and beauty found in nature’s seemingly random patterns and cycles.
—Sara Cahill Marron, author of Call Me Spes & Reasons for the Long Tu’m
There is a deft poetic intelligence at work in Tom Zemsky’s poems, fluent in image and metaphor.
—Frederick Smock, Kentucky State Poet Laureate 2017-2018, author of Bounteous World
The voice of most poets is derivative. Tom Zemsky speaks with a voice, a way of looking at the world, that is uniquely his own. His worlds have visiting hours down whose halls we are invited to visit and marvel.
—Richard Taylor, Kentucky State Poet Laureate 1999-2001, author of Snow Falling on Water: Selected and New Poems
About the Author
Thomas Zemsky was born in Hamilton, Ohio in 1947. He attended the University of Cincinnati, following which he received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. From 1976 he made his home in Lexington, Kentucky where he worked for many years for the International Book Project. Following retirement his favorite pastimes included listening to jazz on LP records, Latin American and modern literature, and movies according to the auteur theory. He believed that poetry, first and foremost, is metaphor. He was the author of eight full-length poetry collections, and his poetry also appeared in the Cincinnati Review and Sewanee Review among others. He died in 2024, leaving behind a legacy of unique poetry.
Publication Date: June 1, 2024
Paperback, 72 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-72-1
Written long before the Barbie movie craze, in Thomas Zemsky’s vision his “real live / barbie doll” is twinned with fate, both of them objects “worshipped / by half / the planet” but only Barbie the one to take on (literally) the weight of the world, “every plea / and every curse” until she is left “fatter / than a harem pillow.” Who but the consummate metaphorical poet Zemsky would imagine such a strange fate for her? But that’s what he’s been doing for decades now, observing our world filled with people asking “What does it mean?” and crying “I’m going to shout / if this doesn’t make more sense” and responding with poetry that for all of its sometimes baffling wonder (for “what poetry does with time / hands can’t understand”) does help us make sense of it all. He does make an allusion to film when he describes being in the dark, trying to “believe / we’ll be around / to see / the credits running.” Even if we’re not, at least we have Zemsky’s poetry in the meantime, a harem’s pillow worth of consolation.
Praise for Thomas Zemsky
A Real Live Barbie Doll turns Thomas Zemsky’s idiosyncratic eye towards icons of beauty and meditations on grace, order, and art itself. From personified abstractions to secularly sacred totems, his poems manifest kaleidoscopic inner visions rooted in the sensory world, each line offering glimpses into his sprawling symbolic metaphysical dreamscapes where ethereal and corporeal realms intertwine. For those who revel in poetry’s power to illuminate the unseen, this writer's distinctive voice summons the cosmological imagination. While challenging at times, Zemsky’s poems ultimately reveal an embrace of life’s ambiguities and beauty found in nature’s seemingly random patterns and cycles.
—Sara Cahill Marron, author of Call Me Spes & Reasons for the Long Tu’m
There is a deft poetic intelligence at work in Tom Zemsky’s poems, fluent in image and metaphor.
—Frederick Smock, Kentucky State Poet Laureate 2017-2018, author of Bounteous World
The voice of most poets is derivative. Tom Zemsky speaks with a voice, a way of looking at the world, that is uniquely his own. His worlds have visiting hours down whose halls we are invited to visit and marvel.
—Richard Taylor, Kentucky State Poet Laureate 1999-2001, author of Snow Falling on Water: Selected and New Poems
About the Author
Thomas Zemsky was born in Hamilton, Ohio in 1947. He attended the University of Cincinnati, following which he received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. From 1976 he made his home in Lexington, Kentucky where he worked for many years for the International Book Project. Following retirement his favorite pastimes included listening to jazz on LP records, Latin American and modern literature, and movies according to the auteur theory. He believed that poetry, first and foremost, is metaphor. He was the author of eight full-length poetry collections, and his poetry also appeared in the Cincinnati Review and Sewanee Review among others. He died in 2024, leaving behind a legacy of unique poetry.
Publication Date: June 1, 2024
Paperback, 72 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-72-1
Written long before the Barbie movie craze, in Thomas Zemsky’s vision his “real live / barbie doll” is twinned with fate, both of them objects “worshipped / by half / the planet” but only Barbie the one to take on (literally) the weight of the world, “every plea / and every curse” until she is left “fatter / than a harem pillow.” Who but the consummate metaphorical poet Zemsky would imagine such a strange fate for her? But that’s what he’s been doing for decades now, observing our world filled with people asking “What does it mean?” and crying “I’m going to shout / if this doesn’t make more sense” and responding with poetry that for all of its sometimes baffling wonder (for “what poetry does with time / hands can’t understand”) does help us make sense of it all. He does make an allusion to film when he describes being in the dark, trying to “believe / we’ll be around / to see / the credits running.” Even if we’re not, at least we have Zemsky’s poetry in the meantime, a harem’s pillow worth of consolation.
Praise for Thomas Zemsky
A Real Live Barbie Doll turns Thomas Zemsky’s idiosyncratic eye towards icons of beauty and meditations on grace, order, and art itself. From personified abstractions to secularly sacred totems, his poems manifest kaleidoscopic inner visions rooted in the sensory world, each line offering glimpses into his sprawling symbolic metaphysical dreamscapes where ethereal and corporeal realms intertwine. For those who revel in poetry’s power to illuminate the unseen, this writer's distinctive voice summons the cosmological imagination. While challenging at times, Zemsky’s poems ultimately reveal an embrace of life’s ambiguities and beauty found in nature’s seemingly random patterns and cycles.
—Sara Cahill Marron, author of Call Me Spes & Reasons for the Long Tu’m
There is a deft poetic intelligence at work in Tom Zemsky’s poems, fluent in image and metaphor.
—Frederick Smock, Kentucky State Poet Laureate 2017-2018, author of Bounteous World
The voice of most poets is derivative. Tom Zemsky speaks with a voice, a way of looking at the world, that is uniquely his own. His worlds have visiting hours down whose halls we are invited to visit and marvel.
—Richard Taylor, Kentucky State Poet Laureate 1999-2001, author of Snow Falling on Water: Selected and New Poems
About the Author
Thomas Zemsky was born in Hamilton, Ohio in 1947. He attended the University of Cincinnati, following which he received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. From 1976 he made his home in Lexington, Kentucky where he worked for many years for the International Book Project. Following retirement his favorite pastimes included listening to jazz on LP records, Latin American and modern literature, and movies according to the auteur theory. He believed that poetry, first and foremost, is metaphor. He was the author of eight full-length poetry collections, and his poetry also appeared in the Cincinnati Review and Sewanee Review among others. He died in 2024, leaving behind a legacy of unique poetry.