- Authors
Tom Sleigh
Tom Sleigh’s many books include the 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize winner, The King’s Touch, House of Fact, House of Ruin, Station Zed, and Army Cats, all from Graywolf Press. His most recent book of essays is The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing In an Age of Refugees. His awards include a Guggenheim, two NEA grants, Kingsley Tufts Award, Shelley Memorial Award, and both the Updike Award and Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Threepenny, Poetry, and other magazines. A Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, he lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Praise for Rosie
Harrowing, tender, contradictory: Tom Sleigh has made a living portrait of his dead mother. Rosie is fiercely alive in these stark pages. Alive in her unhappiness, her outrageousness, her toughness, her affection, in the love of language she bequeathed to her poet son. This book starts with a vision of the mother’s corpse and ends with the death she insisted on, and for which she demanded her son’s help. This memoir is his tribute to her, a grim and loving truthfulness, and a gift to the English language.
Love, honor, pity, pride, compassion, and sacrifice — all the great themes of literature that Faulkner enumerated in his famous Nobel speech are on vivid display in Tom Sleigh’s Rosie. Written in the immediate wake of his mother’s death, it hums with the freshness of the loss, as if its coruscating sentences might will her back to life. And the life the book describes is a quintessentially 20th century American one, that Faulkner himself would have recognized: from hardscrabble poverty to an incendiary marriage to a devastating accusation from one of her own sons later in life. The Rosie that Sleigh summons here is funny, infuriating, irresistible, and often wise, as is the book itself. Read it and weep.