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SALVAGE

SALVAGE

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9968584-4-1

Pub Date: Sept. 2016

Pages: 78


By Thomas Aslin


Salvage is Thomas Aslin’s second full-length collection, and like his first, A Moon Over Wings, these poems range from elegy and lament to poems of praise. Almost psalm-like at times, these meditative and lyric poems take a close look at the Palouse and those who worked and lived on the land.


“Thomas Aslin is a poet of large spaces and intimate feelings, and when these forces merge in a poem they create a singular, unique voice in American poetry. The tone of many poems in this new book is a kind of adagio, a sense of time passing, dissolving, leaving imprints of wonder, where loss (of mother, of father, friends, lovers) is salvaged by an alchemy of language, by the music of poetry. I know of no other poet who explores with such clarity, honesty, and intensity the shifting intricacies of the family, our primal world. These substantial, fine-crafted poems, accomplish what all good poems do—they make us acutely aware of the marvelous, in ourselves and in the world.”

—Joseph Stroud


    “I am no good at love” writes Thomas Aslin in one of the lyrical and tough-hearted poems that make up Salvage. Yet love pervades these poems. A tangled family history, homage to poetic forbears, the landscape of the Pacific Northwest and a love affair gone awry play themselves out in these poems. Aslin’s gift is to confront loss and see it not as a reason to grieve but a means to move forward. “When I walk, I walk with him,” Aslin writes of his father and readers will want to walk with Aslin, to accompany him through these stark and lovely poems.

    —Al Maginnes


    Born in Spokane, Thomas Aslin was educated at the University of Washington and the University of Montana where he studied with Madeline DeFrees, William Kittredge, and Richard Hugo and earned an MFA. In addition to this volume, Aslin has published a chapbook and a full-length collection, A Moon Over Wings, which was a finalist in 2009 for the Washington State Book Award. Since retiring from driving metropolitan buses, Aslin spends his time in Seattle and Port Townsend, Washington.

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