advisory board member Thom Ward: new book

Thom Ward, Advisory Board member of the Wilkes Creative Writing MA/MFA programs, has a new poetry book available from Accents Publishing. Etcetera’s Mistress, with original cover art by acclaimed artist DeLoss McGraw, follows Ward’s previous publications Small Boat with Oars of Different Size, The Matter of the Casket and Various Orbits.

What Other Poets Say About Etcetera’s Mistress

“Reading Thom Ward is to enter a brilliant and restless imagination – sometimes poignant, sometimes crazy-with-a-purpose, but always with a deep lucidity in the logic of its illogic. His poems remind me how much we need language and how much the language needs us.”

– Thomas Lux

“On Thom Ward’s diagram of the day, no line, border, or boundary exists between dark and light sides. They overlay one another with rich and haunting texture. His navigational map, his poetic GPS, locates a landscape full of brilliantly wry and tender intelligences.”

– Naomi Shihab Nye

“Waxing or waning, the moon’s aloft in Thom Ward’s stunning new prose poems, jingling sonnets, and philosophical forays, with Ward dangling from the same moon like a lovely Shakespearean fool. Here he swings nightly, panting and sweating in his night sweats and sweatpants, and caroling across the chasms of loneliness, kicking around the stars. Who better than Ward to help us love?”

– Alan Michael Parker

From Etcetera’s Mistress –

‘Actually, However’

He fell, and fell hard, like his heart was a mob informant and she

the East River. Actually, he was a mob informant, the only

way to advance his stalled career on the squad. She, however,

was not the East River but the black leather, blue-eyed mistress

of Butch the Barracuda. Few salt water fish in the East River;

however, there were plenty of decomposing informants, even he

knew that, knew her mouth was moist as a June strawberry,

cartons shipped from the docks along with the guns and the crack.

Actually, he had never kissed her, though he knew how succulent

she would taste, especially at night, along the shore of the East River;

however, at the card table in the back of the warehouse, he called

Butch by his Christian name, instantly blowing his cover, the cold

bullet finding his brain, and he now finding himself sinking in the

East River, which he always knew had never, actually, been her.

 

Details and Ordering 

Format: Softcover, 6″ x 9″

ISBN: 978-1-936628-03-2

Price: $10.00

Order directly from Accents Publishing

Buy or Review it on Amazon.com 

 

About the Author

Thom Ward is sole proprietor of Thom Ward’s Poetry Editing and Proofreading Services (thombward@gmail.com). Ward’s poetry collections include Small Boat with Oars of Different Size (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000) and Various Orbits (Carnegie Mellon, 2004). Ward’s poetry chapbook, Tumblekid, winner of the 1998 Devil’s Millhopper poetry contest, was published by the University of South Carolina-Aiken in 2000. His collection of prose poems, The Matter of the Casket, was published by CustomWords in 2007. Ward teaches creative writing workshops at high schools and colleges around the country, tutors individual poetry students, and edits poetry manuscripts. He is a faculty and advisory board member at Wilkes University’s Graduate Creative Writing program in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Thom Ward lives in western New York with his girlfriend Jennifer and their cat Phantom.