My Heart Is Not Asleep

In the poems of his new book, Thomas A. Thomas delicately reconstructs moments from a shared life altered by the gradual dissolution caused by Alzheimer's. Through lyrical verses, Thomas navigates the landscape of memory, where physical intimacy melds with present longing, blurring the lines of what was and what is. Nature, a silent witness to their journey, becomes a companion in Thomas's, echoing their story- from the tender touch of picking berries to the profound significance of "the month apples begin to blush at the thought of falling." My Heart Is Not Asleep delineates a world where pain and beauty converge, where love endures. This book is a powerful affirmation of humanity and courage.

-Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Bad Harvest

This is a lush creation of song and scar, of vulnerability and emotional honesty. In Thomas A. Thomas's debut collection, My Heart Is Not Asleep, the natural and human worlds mingle in accessible and poignant ways. Brimming with meditations on the self and other, humanity and the natural world, these vibrant poems remain grounded in a universal familiarity that opens us up to something greater.

-John Sibley Williams, author of The Drowning House

What a blessing this book is: poems earned from the threshold of love and loss, attuned to music, drenched in gorgeous imagery, and with the steady cadence of a voice willing to stay with pain and revelation. The offering of these poems, which is a true kind of gift and medicine, is one born of a courage, to return to a heart that is not asleep, that is again and again awake and open to the ravishing heartbreak of the slow loss of a beloved, and to the persistent beauty of fog and the Salish sea, of the scrape of seal whiskers on the bottom of a kayak, of huckleberry and cedar fronds and ferns, where "bright silent, urgent light rushes to touch it all." Thomas reminds us that grief and beauty are inexorable, and that patient attunement and intimacy with beauty is a path that can carry us through. -Anne Haven McDonnell, author of Breath on a Coal

Thomas Thomas's tender poems of love and grief are beautiful and powerful, sometimes overwhelming the reader with their unabashed emotion: "I know, I know, I know everything loved is to be lost / and scattered; and yet the daily lesson drums / in the blood beneath my skin." Thomas's well-crafted poems lament the shortness of life while celebrating memory's power to keep the past alive. -Michael Simms, author of Strange Meadowlark

What a poignant pleasure it is to read My Heart Is Not Asleep, bittersweet as many of Thomas's subjects are. I felt like I was kayaking with the poet, walking the beach with him, taking in all the natural wonders that offer him consolation on a daily basis. Thomas has captured the anguish of ambiguous loss- the endless ebbing that is dementia-but he has also captured the intimate connection that is still there for so long; and that love that never ends. -Ann Hedreen, author of Her Beautiful Brain