"Titled Letter to Poetry, the book is a single coherent poem in many sections. Jean Day writes of it, In Letter to Poetry, Tom Mandel finds both Rhyme and Reason under the hood of his Coupe de Ville. Rhyme is sometimes played for winks and Reason cloaked in gentle humor ("Maybe more hot air would make it / safe to cross the brink of this thin ice?"), but the undertones are stoic, Talmudic, and wise. Poetry offers Mandel a vast formal, historical, and even autobiographical toolkit. When he writes that a metaphor is "like a noun no longer / used on that occasion," his words are both wistful and transporting. Poetry was built to perform this task"--

Poetry. Tom Mandel grew up in Chicago and was educated in its jazz and blues clubs and at the University of Chicago where he studied on the Committee on Social Thought with Hannah Arendt and Saul Bellow. He has lived in New York, Paris, San Francisco and Washington DC, and now resides in a small town on the Atlantic coast. He has taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois and San Francisco State University (where he was director of the Poetry Center). Mandel was closely associated with the rise of Language Poetry during its formative years in the 1970s and 1980s. This is is his first new book since the mid-1990s.

Poetry. "The world, as refracted through the lens of Tom Mandel's poetry, takes on the singularity of a new kind of order. His voice is fresh, astringent and altogether compelling. He is a dynamic presence" -John Ashbery.