Tomas Unger Unbound

Tomas Unger is a poet, teacher, and critic whose writing moves between poetry, visual art, and the spaces where the two meet. His essays and poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and The Yale Review. In his writing, Unger is drawn to the ordinary object, the unexpected encounter, and the quiet mystery contained within moments of attention. His poems are marked by a remarkable spareness and precision, allowing familiar things—a piano, a moon, a hotel hallway, a boat—to gather presence and significance without forcing them into explanation. His critical work similarly reflects a wide-ranging curiosity about art and the ways different forms can illuminate one another.This week on Authors Unbound, we talk with Tomas Unger about his debut collection, Odd Hour, a book concerned with memory, silence, encounters, and the strange moments when the familiar world seems briefly unfamiliar. Unger reads several poems from the collection, including “Piano,” “Once,” “Still,” and “Went Away,” and speaks about the experiences and works of art that helped shape them. He recalls the childhood experience of sleepwalking through a hotel hallway in Rio that became the starting point for “Once,” and considers how poetry can transform such an experience without explaining it away. We talk about the influence of poets including A.R. Ammons, Seamus Heaney, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens, as well as the relationship between poetry and photography. For Unger, poetry has a particular ability to give us the human voice: something spare, vulnerable, and capable of carrying us toward a depth that does not require obscurity. The conversation also turns toward visual artists, translation, reading, and the importance of getting outside the habits of one's own art in order to return to it with renewed curiosity.Join us for a rich conversation about silence, attention, memory, and the mysterious ways poetry makes the world newly present.This is Tomas Unger Unbound.Purchase your copy of Odd Hour directly from Unbound Edition Press.For more from Unbound Edition Press, visit us at unboundedition.com.