A friend of mine, the talented poet/writer/musician Thomas Moore (who let me release an album of his music on MZR under the name Thomas Moronic) has just put out his second collection of poetry, "Hospital" (following 2008's "Surfaces").
Says Thomas:
I’m happy to announce the release of my new book HOSPITAL. It’s been hovering around for a little while now, so it feels good (and also very strange) to finally send it into the world. HOSPITAL is a collection of 19 poems that I started work on over the summer. I guess anyone who knows what that period was like for me will know that it was perhaps the hardest time of my life so far. Because of that I feel very different to the majority of the new pieces in HOSPITAL than I do to the rest of my writing. In a lot of ways I just feel that I have no distance from the work. While my mother was dying I didn’t know what to do with myself, and I guess in many ways I still don’t. The only thing that I knew I could do during that time, was write. I don’t know whether it helped me work myself out of certain things or if it had no effect at all. I just knew that I didn’t for one second want to stop writing. I wanted to get some things down – I think I felt that I had no choice in a way. I don’t know how I will feel about some of these poems in a few months, in a few years time. I don’t know if I’ll be able to look at them. At the moment, some of them feel too raw to think about. HOSPITAL is a book so close to me right now. This isn’t in any way meant to sound melodramatic or anything like that. I guess I’m just introducing the collection and putting it in some kind of context. I don’t know whatever. Here it is anyway. This is dedicated to the memory of my mother.
BLURBS:
“Thomas Moore's HOSPITAL is a harrowing, dazzling, magnificent collection of poems. From its rigorous mapping of the jagged miscommunication that dogs online conversation to its intensive, exquisite search for words precise enough to bear the meaning of an incommunicable sadness, this is a more powerful, brilliant book than I could have imagined.”
- Dennis Cooper, author of God Jr, The Sluts, and The George Miles Cycle.
“Moore made a striking debut with Surfaces, an edgy suite of poems on yearning, resistance, and beauty. Here he goes magically deeper, hammering his wrists on the door that separates the dead from the living—thin membrane on which this writing inscribes itself like a breath. It’s more fluid and persuasive now that it’s known tragedy. “Let me know,” Moore pleads, “when your body is tired/ So I can run water under every word that/ You say.” His prosody’s sometimes bumpy, but it gives him the leverage to heave the whole world from one level of consciousness to the next. Even in his sweats he is the most attentive of poets, attentive of sons.”
- Kevin Killian, author of Shy, Little Men and Action Kylie
HOSPITAL is a Broken Blood Press book.
It can be purchased off the Lulu website at this link: http://www.lulu.com/content/5617629
