HOW TO BUILD A THEATER, poetry by Thomas Zemsky
Publication Date: June 1, 2024
Paperback, 66 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-73-8
“Remember… / to bring a stage with you / wherever you are, / ’cause there’s always a play going on.” Thomas Zemsky brings the stage, and the players, and most of all the words to animate his theater of poetic invention. Old vaudevillians and slapstick clowns, Judy Holliday and Melville, a man in a gray flannel suit and an old priest, the three stooges and even the pope, all tread the boards with the sound of Cajun music in the background. He shows us our world where “In the Suburbs// …the four-stroke gasoline engine / is more important than / anything Freud had come up with” and where “Old Men // …feel safe in their worlds / with borders of a few miles, / sometimes a few blocks / with a few details” where a manhole cover can “stand for infinity / and satisfy the mind’s need / for symbols.” Zemsky has been mining life for such symbols for a long while now, finding nothing “too small for metaphor.” Like “The Author” in his closing poem, his work has been to “harvest our vision / as best we can.” His best has been good indeed.
Praise for Thomas Zemsky
Zemsky is a master who presents the world in a new, astonishing way.
—Robert Eastwood, author of Cantata Angeleno & Snare
From personified abstractions to secularly sacred totems, Thomas Zemsky’s poems manifest kaleidoscopic inner visions rooted in the sensory world, each line offering glimpses into his sprawling symbolic dreamscapes where ethereal and corporeal realms intertwine. While challenging at times, his poems ultimately reveal an embrace of life's ambiguities and beauty found in nature's seemingly random patterns and cycles. For those who revel in poetry's power to illuminate the unseen, this writer's distinctive voice summons the cosmological imagination.
—Sara Cahill Marron, author of Call Me Spes & Reasons for the Long Tu’m
The voice of most poets is derivative. Tom Zemsky speaks with a voice, a way of looking at the world, that is uniquely his own.
—Richard Taylor, Kentucky State Poet Laureate 1999-2001, author of Snow Falling on Water: Selected and New Poems
About the Author
Thomas Zemsky was born in Hamilton, Ohio in 1947. He received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Since 1976 he made his home in Lexington, Kentucky where he worked for many years for the International Book Project. Following retirement his favorite pastimes included listening to jazz on LP records, Latin American and modern literature, and movies according to the auteur theory. He believed that poetry, first and foremost, is metaphor. He was the author of eight full-length poetry collections, and his poetry also appeared in the Cincinnati Review and Sewanee Review among others. He died in 2024, leaving behind a legacy of unique poetry.
Publication Date: June 1, 2024
Paperback, 66 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-73-8
“Remember… / to bring a stage with you / wherever you are, / ’cause there’s always a play going on.” Thomas Zemsky brings the stage, and the players, and most of all the words to animate his theater of poetic invention. Old vaudevillians and slapstick clowns, Judy Holliday and Melville, a man in a gray flannel suit and an old priest, the three stooges and even the pope, all tread the boards with the sound of Cajun music in the background. He shows us our world where “In the Suburbs// …the four-stroke gasoline engine / is more important than / anything Freud had come up with” and where “Old Men // …feel safe in their worlds / with borders of a few miles, / sometimes a few blocks / with a few details” where a manhole cover can “stand for infinity / and satisfy the mind’s need / for symbols.” Zemsky has been mining life for such symbols for a long while now, finding nothing “too small for metaphor.” Like “The Author” in his closing poem, his work has been to “harvest our vision / as best we can.” His best has been good indeed.
Praise for Thomas Zemsky
Zemsky is a master who presents the world in a new, astonishing way.
—Robert Eastwood, author of Cantata Angeleno & Snare
From personified abstractions to secularly sacred totems, Thomas Zemsky’s poems manifest kaleidoscopic inner visions rooted in the sensory world, each line offering glimpses into his sprawling symbolic dreamscapes where ethereal and corporeal realms intertwine. While challenging at times, his poems ultimately reveal an embrace of life's ambiguities and beauty found in nature's seemingly random patterns and cycles. For those who revel in poetry's power to illuminate the unseen, this writer's distinctive voice summons the cosmological imagination.
—Sara Cahill Marron, author of Call Me Spes & Reasons for the Long Tu’m
The voice of most poets is derivative. Tom Zemsky speaks with a voice, a way of looking at the world, that is uniquely his own.
—Richard Taylor, Kentucky State Poet Laureate 1999-2001, author of Snow Falling on Water: Selected and New Poems
About the Author
Thomas Zemsky was born in Hamilton, Ohio in 1947. He received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Since 1976 he made his home in Lexington, Kentucky where he worked for many years for the International Book Project. Following retirement his favorite pastimes included listening to jazz on LP records, Latin American and modern literature, and movies according to the auteur theory. He believed that poetry, first and foremost, is metaphor. He was the author of eight full-length poetry collections, and his poetry also appeared in the Cincinnati Review and Sewanee Review among others. He died in 2024, leaving behind a legacy of unique poetry.
Publication Date: June 1, 2024
Paperback, 66 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-73-8
“Remember… / to bring a stage with you / wherever you are, / ’cause there’s always a play going on.” Thomas Zemsky brings the stage, and the players, and most of all the words to animate his theater of poetic invention. Old vaudevillians and slapstick clowns, Judy Holliday and Melville, a man in a gray flannel suit and an old priest, the three stooges and even the pope, all tread the boards with the sound of Cajun music in the background. He shows us our world where “In the Suburbs// …the four-stroke gasoline engine / is more important than / anything Freud had come up with” and where “Old Men // …feel safe in their worlds / with borders of a few miles, / sometimes a few blocks / with a few details” where a manhole cover can “stand for infinity / and satisfy the mind’s need / for symbols.” Zemsky has been mining life for such symbols for a long while now, finding nothing “too small for metaphor.” Like “The Author” in his closing poem, his work has been to “harvest our vision / as best we can.” His best has been good indeed.
Praise for Thomas Zemsky
Zemsky is a master who presents the world in a new, astonishing way.
—Robert Eastwood, author of Cantata Angeleno & Snare
From personified abstractions to secularly sacred totems, Thomas Zemsky’s poems manifest kaleidoscopic inner visions rooted in the sensory world, each line offering glimpses into his sprawling symbolic dreamscapes where ethereal and corporeal realms intertwine. While challenging at times, his poems ultimately reveal an embrace of life's ambiguities and beauty found in nature's seemingly random patterns and cycles. For those who revel in poetry's power to illuminate the unseen, this writer's distinctive voice summons the cosmological imagination.
—Sara Cahill Marron, author of Call Me Spes & Reasons for the Long Tu’m
The voice of most poets is derivative. Tom Zemsky speaks with a voice, a way of looking at the world, that is uniquely his own.
—Richard Taylor, Kentucky State Poet Laureate 1999-2001, author of Snow Falling on Water: Selected and New Poems
About the Author
Thomas Zemsky was born in Hamilton, Ohio in 1947. He received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Since 1976 he made his home in Lexington, Kentucky where he worked for many years for the International Book Project. Following retirement his favorite pastimes included listening to jazz on LP records, Latin American and modern literature, and movies according to the auteur theory. He believed that poetry, first and foremost, is metaphor. He was the author of eight full-length poetry collections, and his poetry also appeared in the Cincinnati Review and Sewanee Review among others. He died in 2024, leaving behind a legacy of unique poetry.