Tom Sleigh
As seen in:
MSN UK,
The New York Times,
The New Yorker,
Poetry Magazine,
City AM,
CityAM,
Poem-a-Day,
Los Angeles Review of Books,
Ploughshares,
The Progressive
and
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Articles by Tom Sleigh
London’s new front door for growth opens in the Square Mile.
While the Square Mile is smaller than many parks, you might be surprised to know it supports 676,000 jobs and generates over £109bn of economic output a year [ONS]. Indeed, national growth happens when businesses choose to invest, when talent chooses to come in, when visitors choose to spend time, and when places make it easier for opportunity to become delivery.
When a building reminds you why you love your job
Every so often, a project comes along that captures the essence of why working in and for a great city is such a privilege. The opening of the new hub by Premier Inn by Whitbread in Farringdon at the Old Bailey is one of those moments that we now encounter quite frequently in the City, when heritage and modernity meet. I was invited to Whitbread's opening ceremony for the hotel earlier this month, where I met Yasmin from their marketing team.
Optimism from Expo Real 2025
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“This Terrible Fantasy”: Metafiction and Altered Reality in Marina and Sergey Dyachenko’s School of Shards
School of Shards, the final installment in Marina and Sergey Dyachenko’s Vita Nostra dark fantasy series, asks us to consider the possibility that the universe is made solely out of language. This idea is based on the Book of Genesis, when God makes a series of pronouncements about light and darkness, Heaven and Earth, and animals and people, calling these material things into being.
Breaker
by Tom Sleigh There Sarah and I are, all those years ago, and Hannah, still just a little girl, too scared, defiant, jealous to leave her mother for long as she took her very first walk with me down the beach that afternoon.
November 2021 Poetry Feature
New poems by our contributors. Table of Contents: POLINA BARSKOVA | Joy (translated by Valzhyna Mort, appears in both Russian and English) ALDO AMPARÁN | Parable of the Haunted Cloak TOM SLEIGH | A Dictator Walks into a Bar MICHAEL DUMANIS | Ordeal Joy By Polina Barskova to V.Z. An earring returns, from under the cupboard, a bewept, priceless, pennyworth, Venetian bauble. Twinkling with guilt through the dust or possibly fur.
Apology to My Daughter
October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry By TOM SLEIGH “Life is not a walk across a field…”—Pasternak For ten years, Hannah, the world convinced me that thorn trees, desert, Land Rovers tricked out with CB radios, machine guns and armor plate, grew more real the harder it became to fulfill my nightly promise to rebar and rubble that some final vowel would reverse time and resurrect stunted concrete into a city.
Last Cigarette
October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry By TOM SLEIGH After the explosions, the big one of the Big Bang, the little one of the firecrackers set by some kid off in weeds in the field, not a sound in outer space or here back on Earth disturbs the perfect peace of the unmoving afternoon.
After Bombardment, Sonya
He said, "It is terrible what happens." And "So, Mr. Tom, do not forget me"—an old-fashioned ring, pop tunes, salsa! salsa! the techno-version of Beethoven's Fifth, Fairouz singing how love has arrived, that's what he heard after they dropped the bombs, his ambulance crawling through smoke while cellphones going off here here here kept ringing— how the rubble-buried bodies' still living relatives kept calling to see who survived.
Real Estate
Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors To have a thought, there must be an object— the field is empty, sloshed with gold, a hayfield thick with sunshine. There must be an object so land a man there, solid on his feet, on solid ground, in a field fully flooded, enough light to see him clearly, Detail of the Hayfield I followed myself for a long while, deep into the field. Two heads full of garbage. Our scope was larger than I realized, which only made me that much more responsible.
David Jones
While not as well known as other modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, David Jones “is increasingly regarded as an important, innovative poet, who has extended and refined the techniques of literary modernism,” according to Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Vincent B.
Not-Her
“Just a child” is the phrase for them the NGOers always used. A phrase in which “just a child” meant categories of inviolable trust, of innocence destroyed, of abused understandings between NGOers, parents, child, world.
Wilfred Owen | Poetry Foundation
Wilfred Owen, who wrote some of the best British poetry on World War I, composed nearly all of his poems in slightly over a year, from August 1917 to September 1918. In November 1918 he was killed in action at the age of 25, one week before the Armistice. Only five poems were published in his lifetime—three in the Nation and two that appeared anonymously in the Hydra, a journal he edited in 1917 when he was a patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh.
Stethoscope by Tom Sleigh
i.m. Denis Johnson, 1949–2017 It wasn’t that there was anything to say that would stop him from feeling this way — the X of himself splayed out in space where gravity was weakest. He and his father and talkative mother suffering tiny strokes that took away this syllable from this word, that syllable from that, all this lay in one pan of the balance scale while in the other there was nothing but dark matter and the cosmic inconsequence of his literal physical heart beating.
An Introduction to the Trumpoems
[Adapted from the symposium on Poetry & Populism held at University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany, July 12-14, 2018.] Adapted from the symposium on Poetry & Populism held at University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany, July 12-14, 2018. So, the world gets smaller as the United States and Europe come closer in yet another way.
New York American Spell, 2001 by Tom Sleigh
What was going on in the New York American The elevator door was closing behind us, we were the ones Plunging floor after floor after floor after floor To the abyss—but it was someone else’s face Staring from the screen out at us, someone else’s face Saying something flashing from the teleprompter: Though what the face said was meant to reassure, Down in the abyss the footage kept playing, All of it looping back like children chanting A classmate who doesn’t know the question: “Because it’s...
Thom Gunn
Thom Gunn was born in Kent, England to parents who were both journalists. Gunn’s early life was peripatetic; after his parents’ divorce, he traveled with his father to various assignments and attended a number of different schools. His mother committed suicide when Gunn was fifteen. In an interview with the Paris Review Gunn spoke about the effect of his mother’s death: “I was devastated for about four years. I very much retired into myself.
Before Rain
Whatever you do, there are rockets falling, and after the rockets, smoke climbing up through walls that are exploding. Trees grow up where there once were people, weeds take over beds of lettuces and coddled flowers, The bricked-in hours of the human have all been knocked down. The text above was just an excerpt. The web versions of our print articles are now hosted by Duke University Press, Tikkun’s publisher. Click here to read an HTML version of the article.
From Amman, An Unfinished Roll of Film
Note to readers: The names of the people and some of the institutions in this story have been changed. All photos by Lesley M. M. Blume. WHEN I WAS a 23-year-old grad student, more than anything, I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. More specifically, I wanted to be Christiane Amanpour or Martha Gellhorn, or basically a female Edward Murrow, and — in my mind — the more alien the backdrop for my training, the better.
The Fox - The New Yorker
Marine helicopters on maneuver kept dippingtoward swells at Black’s Beach, my board’s poise giving way to freefall of my wave tubing over me, nubs of wax under my feet as I crouchedunder the lip, sped across the face and kicked out—all over Southern Cal a haze settled: as if light breathed that technicolor smog at sunset over San Diego Harbor where battleships at anchor,just back from patrolling the South China Sea, were having rust scraped off and painted gray.
Spring 2016
The Spring 2016 issue of Ploughshares. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year's three issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles, with the Winter issue staff-edited. Acclaimed poets Tom Sleigh and Alan Shapiro guest-edit this poetry and prose issue of Ploughshares.
Things That Break
Skin of a plum. Rotting tooth. Switches cut down by a child to lash a child’s legs. A siege does something like this against sturdy walls. The wrong rules. A dozen angel figurines flying from a balcony. Flailing fist. Splint....
The New York Times
The sidelong whiplash of his arm sent the boomerang soaring, pushing the sky to the horizon until the blade just hung there, a black slash on the sun so far away it seemed not to move at all before it came whirling back larger and larger: would it hit him, would he die — and you ducked down, terrified, clinging to his thigh, its deathspin slowing as it coptered softly down and he snatched it from the air.
Proof of Poetry by Tom Sleigh : The Poetry Foundation
I wanted first to end up as a drunk in the gutter and in my twenties I almost ended up there— and then as an alternative to vodka, to live alone like a hermit philosopher and court the extreme poverty that I suspected lay in store for me anyway— and then there were the years in which I needed very badly to take refuge in mediocrity, and that was the worst, the very worst— you could say that always my life was like a patchwork quilt always ripped apart— my life like scraps stitched together in...
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