Holding On for Dear Life

From the Back Cover \n"In a volume dedicated to his father, Thom Tammaro goes over familial territory where smoke stacks stand like trees in the steel town where he was raised. It is about the human relationship between father and son, their working-class roots, the catechisms and holy history of one's childhood. If poetry can be seen as enablement, this collection holds up the meaning of experience, imagery, and travels that make hallways where you swear you see the words live. The book is the steady logging of details that are our breath. Hold on to these poems for the dear life of your humanity. Here the poem and prose-poem master sings with seeming ease."
--Diane Glancy, Author of
Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears and Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea\n"Tammaro's poems are class acts of reliving, rejoicing, and remembering the spectacle of the mundane, the everyday matter that we all know and too often ignore in the rush of moving forward. In the sweep of a prose poem and the slap of a lyric, his meditations on life, family, work, love, and death help us all to let go of the real and hold on to the spiritual. It's rare to have your own memory so touched by the writing of another."
--Fred Gardaphe, author of
Leaving Little Italy: Essaying Italian American Culture and Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative.
About the Author
Thom Tammaro was born and raised in the heart of the steel valley of western Pennsylvania. Since 1983, he has lived and worked in Moorhead, Minnesota, where he is Professor of English and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Minnesota State University. He is the author of two collections of poems, and co-editor of anthologies of poems about Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams, all published by the University of Iowa Press.