The Thomas Salto

Timmy Straw

The ambitious and astonishing debut poetry collection by Timmy Straw, The Thomas Salto forms its poetics in the shadow of the Soviet Union, the AIDS epidemic, US proxy wars, and the motion of a dangerous gymnastics move popularized during the Cold War--the "Thomas salto."

The Thomas Salto takes its name from a difficult and dangerous move in gymnastics, a leaping triple flip popularized during the last years of the Cold War. Both in its Reagan-grained historicity, and in the human body that bears the leap's flight and risk, the Thomas salto is a kinetic figure for these poems' action in time and space. They shadow the AIDS epidemic, the war on drugs, the US proxy wars in Central America, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, the Soviet collapse – not as history but as the camouflage-pattern of "then" and "to come" which form the flickering and very real habitus of the present.

'These poems are in some sense unimaginable. They seem inscribed with a strange light as if at a weird angle. This is the real world, dingy, backlit and heartbreaking, and it is also a world where words can cut the world in half and give it back to itself but rarefied this time, now uneasy and beautiful and strange. You have never read poems that work like these, in their internal architecture and it's breaking, between private and public, between world and... something else; Stevens and Oppen would weep –  Straw writes 'and if you write the poem you kindly / here or cruelly there can trace / the shadows of the netting / as it falls on people, animals, and things.' This is exactly what they do in this work, with a skillful ear, care, and brilliance.' – Cody-Rose Clevidence