The Thomas Salto - by Timmy Straw

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"The Thomas Salto, Timmy Straw's debut collection, offers what very little poetry in our time seems to manage: work that is both overtly political and unflinchingly aesthetic."-- "McSweeney's"

"Has our species ever been more in need of new ways of thinking through our relation to the real, to the simulated, to each other? With a visionary attention to the lived sensorium of the present and its historical givens, The Thomas Salto reveals a brilliantly nuanced view of individual agency in the age of falling empires. If the future is survivable, this is what its poetry sounds like."-- "Elizabeth Willis, author of The Human Abstract"

"Musical and graceful like Super 8 movies of Victorian poetry, disjunctive and modern in its strange contiguities, Timmy Straw's The Thomas Salto employs great verbal precision to formulate sensations and perceptions, many of which give address to 1980s America and its inheritors. In these beautiful, intelligent poems, 'this is how from time to time we find / a question to clear our answers for a time.'"-- "Eugene Ostashevsky, author of The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi"

"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, author of Beast Feast"

"Beautiful, shivery, eerie, these poems have a surgical precision of sound, used to convey the vast mystery in an image...to dismantle time."--Elisa Gabbert "The New York Times-Best of Poetry 2023"

"In this poised and philosophically astute debut, Straw assembles the constituent parts of a self--the 'things we learned but did not know and / could / not say'--and aspires to a poetry that 'grows outward to all edges like a self.'"-- "Literary Hub"

"Straw's acrobatic verses tumble through histories of damage and repair to end in a forward roll through our haunted ever after: 'and could never after/ leave/ what we had named.'"--Srikanth Reddy "The Washington Post-Best of Poetry 2023"

About the Author

Timmy Straw's poems, essays, and translations appear in Yale Review, Jacket2, Paris Review, Annulet, Chicago Review, and elsewhere, and their work has been supported by a Fulbright research fellowship to Moscow, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, and a Postgraduate Visiting Writer Fellowship at the University of Iowa. A graduate student in Comp Lit at Penn, they are also working on translations of the contemporary Russian poet Grigori Dashevsky.