Cammy Thomas - Tremors

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired September 13th, 2022) featuring award-winning poet Cammy Thomas who discusses and reads from her most recent poetry collection, Tremors, published by Four Way Books.  Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet’s endlessly interesting and erudite Poet-At-Large, also joins us on the show!  Cammy Thomas’ first book of poems, Cathedral of Wish, received the 2006 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America.  A fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation helped her complete her second book, Inscriptions. Her third book, Tremors, came out in September 2021.  All are published by Four Way Books. Her poems have recently appeared in Image, Poetry Porch, Amsterdam Quarterly, Gravel, and Compose, and in the anthologies, Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Books), and Echoes from Walden (edited by David Leff, from Wayfarer Books). Her poem, "French Toast," was featured on Poem-a-Day on August 6, 2021. Two of her poems are the text for Far Past War, a choral work by her sister, composer Augusta Read Thomas, which was performed by the Cathedral Choral Society at the National Cathedral in Washington DC, March 13, 2022. “Thomas explores how poetry in narrative form can draw from various sources and frames. The tremors in the title have to do with facing the fears that lie beneath the surface. They are also about hoping for a steady hand, taking a deep breath, and summoning the courage to write, despite the quivering scrawl on the page.” —Joyce Wilson - Poetry Porch, 2022 “The poems in Cammy Thomas’s wonderful collection, Tremors, individually and collectively form a coherent, insightful, and very moving arc from the wrong beginnings of a childhood marked by privilege and abuse, whose traumatic dependencies were/are only partly tempered by ambivalent love and belated understanding, to a complex, mature and at times visionary grasp of the intricacies and inextricabilities of beauty and loss, desire and separation, without either side of the equation diminishing the power (for good or ill) of the other. The artistry of the poems is part and parcel of the maturity of the poet. This is a book to live with and cherish.”—Alan Shapiro As always, thanks for listening Yours in Radio, Sharon