‘A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems’ by Tom Snarsky
In Tom Snarsky’s third full-length collection, A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems, readers will discover a world that is not constrained by boundaries of time, place, or expectation. Snarsky continues to demonstrate his unique ability to toggle between the concrete elements of human existence and the ephemeral longings of those same humans. It’s easy to be awed by his mastery of language and impeccable craft; but there is also a deft navigation of multi-layered and complicated emotions in these poems. This is a love letter to humanity: unflinching and unsentimental love for every tiny detail of our frightening and miraculous lives.
***Available for preorder now!***
Official release date July, 2025
US$18 plus shipping
What People Are Saying…
“Tom Snarsky’s A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems reminds me of the deep taproots the trees around me must have to have survived droughts again and again. These are poems whose spirit suggests a deeper life-force exists which could get us through—’it feels impossible, somehow, that you just continue / without knowing what your name means.’ Wherever you are in understanding your place in your ‘own sense of cause or consequence,’ A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems offers an unapologetic clarity I’ve only ever seen in Tom Snarsky’s lines.”
—C.T. Salazar, author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking (Acre Books, 2022)
“At the heart of Tom Snarsky’s A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems is the impossible task of surviving the burdensome reality of American capitalism, the speaker continuously offering straight-faced understanding of its hold on our psyche: ‘Money is the most boring thing in the world, like breathing / it’s annoying when you’re forced to think about it // or it feels impossible, somehow, that you just continue / regulating these flows or you die.’ But Snarsky flips the idea of what’s impossible on its head, the challenge of capitalism’s arbitrary grip pitted against the rarer, more beautiful impossibility of a single, un-replicable life. Across these poems, experience a torrential rush of specificity that only this speaker can provide as he meditates on John Ashbery, Tracy Chapman, the recklessness of angels, probiotics, the perfect Mother’s Day poem, neural microarchitecture, internet companies, and moonshine. And witness poetry’s impossibility, too: the intimacy of a voice extending across the ether, a letter of formal invention that reaches you like ‘…[a] meadow you hold open // [l]ike a door’.”
—Susan L. Leary, author of Dressing the Bear
“We are taxed, indebted, debited, threatened/enticed with bullets, scammed by the internet company and also the internet, imitated by robots, interpolated by information that translates us beyond recognition, transposed from the theory that thinks it has thought of everything to a house nobody can live in– a house that is only a word.
Tom Snarsky has accumulated with admirable geniality and tact a wealth of living against which the overdrafts of late-stage necro-extractive America still draws its funds.
He practices the long poem as Schuyler and Ashbery did it– even when he’s writing a short poem, the sense of his living prods the silent and deafening theft against which all poetry tilts.
I love his wasps, his albino cockroach– I even love it when his sick cat farts. He has written a hymn to life, an archive of antidotes to the mind of war and the sin of despair. “The wedge driven into poetry is poverty,” yet each line earns back in spades what is stolen from us in the bad math of our living. An essential poet.”
—Ariana Reines, author of The Rose
***Available for preorder now!***
Official release date July, 2025
USD$18 plus shipping