{"product_id":"02-01-2022-the-kings-touch-by-tom-sleigh","title":"Sleigh, Tom: The King's Touch","description":"\u003cp\u003eGraywolf Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: February 1, 2022\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: A profound encounter with the hyperreality of our time of global upheaval, violence, and pandemic.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTom Sleigh’s poems are skeptical of the inevitability of our fate, but in this brilliant new collection, they are charged with a powerful sense of premonition, as if the future is unfolding before us, demanding something greater than the self. Justice is a prevailing force, even while the poems are fully cognizant of the refugee crisis, war, famine, and the brutal reality of a crowded hospital morgue.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe King’s Touch\u003c\/i\u003e collides the world of fact and the world of mystery with a resolutely secular register. The title poem refers to the once-held belief that the king, as a divine representative, is imbued with the power of healing touch. Sleigh turns this encounter between illness and human contact toward his own chronic blood disease and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its mounting death tolls. One poem asks, “isn’t it true that no matter how long you \/ wear them, masks don’t grieve, only faces do?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this essential new work, Sleigh shows how the language of poetry itself can revive and recuperate a sense of a future under the conditions of violence, social unrest, and global anxiety about the fate of the planet.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39362549612567,"sku":"9781644450772","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/ts_d3aecddf-6e64-4d41-b8b7-5cc13713a7c0.gif?v=1628725718","url":"https:\/\/open-books-a-poem-emporium.myshopify.com\/products\/02-01-2022-the-kings-touch-by-tom-sleigh","provider":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","version":"1.0","type":"link"}