Space Walk: Contemporary American Poetry Confronting Empire and Violence with Hope and Love

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 catastrophe, they are tethered to the gravitational pull of love and hope.
In Sleigh’s poems, rocket engines and pancake houses, space stations and mom’s kitchen, terrorist organizations and Sundays in a museum are all part of love’s galactic amplitude. Hailing Tom Sleigh’s work, the Los Angeles Times has written 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.