Three on a Wire

Poetry. In THREE ON A WIRE, Thomas R. Thomas reminds us that the haiku remains a versatile poetic form, capable of providing a home for poems that are by turns intimate, lyrical, sensual, rustic, spiritual, and confessional. Thomas' work, which has always been defined by an understated warmth, here utilizes that quality in the service of a collection of poems that feel both timeless and of their moment. In short, THREE ON A WIRE is American poetry at its very finest. --Kareem Tayyar

Thomas R. Thomas is a master of brevity with poetry that clings to the reader with deep sensual epiphanies in lines that don't waste words, lines laced with TNT to give his haiku a potent existential kick. It's hypnotic and precise words put me in a trance as it welcomes so many different levels of human agony and ecstasy with a halting wisdom that whispers to the reader and leaves the reader in a holy trance with it's effortless, spirited flow. There is intense emotion to be felt in the visionary passion of a pure, undaunted free spirit who always says it carefully and with the eloquent beauty of a modern day sage whose verses roam the freeways and hillsides of Southern California, all of them wild horses that Thomas R. Thomas has set free in an effortless dance to the beat of a different Zen drummer. --Kevin Ridgeway

Thomas R. Thomas is a man of quiet introspection, and this collection of haiku captures his interior world. So many of these poems focus on the beauty of domesticity and the life that he has built. Here he captures the small sacred spaces, and moments between moments that are the stuff of life. --John Brantingham