Flying in Water

WINNER OF THE WINNOW PRESS OPEN BOOK AWARD IN POETRY "Because Tomash has a profound understanding of the materials of her art, she's aware that the tangibility of such risk must be palpable for her reader in the geography of the line, line as shoreline, as form that is against and in communion with absence, silence. By the time her reader finds her line, 'In the darkness, many betrayals of darkness,' the terrain is at once realized as spirtiual, philosophic, linguistic, political, and wide, wide open. . . . "These poems are the most unrushed I've read in years. When she asks, "if this world is merely distances, is it not / merely beautiful?' I feel called up, called in. What a gift her invitation is." --Kathleen Peirce, from the Judge's Citation "In Barbara Tomash's beautifully latticed prose poem series, FLYING IN WATER, the reader is treated to the inner workings of a writer thinking about what it means to be a woman in language. One is reminded of Virginia Woolf's THE WAVES, in which the dazzling thoughts of fictive narrators push language closer to truth. The 'she' of Tomash's suite of poems is alert to all the clarity of living and its complex shadows. These poems are gem-like, using 'her voice's cool sleeve,' 'the perfect tool to hammer white open.' And in all of the poems there is also the weight of eternity, of worlds continuing after this particular voice has ended." --Maxine Chernoff "This extended and arresting interior portrait moves from the world to self-awareness to language-awareness with liquid ease: 'the drawing of a leaf to look like a leaf // She is drawn to abstraction. She makes her mark. It is shaped like a leaf that looks like the face of an owl. If language were an arrow and the material world the target, she would never hit. She takes aim at the leaf.' With her sequence of meditative prose vignettes, Barbara Tomash takes aim and makes her mark. FLYING IN WATER is wonderful poetry." --Carol Snow "FLYING IN WATER is an exemplary boo