All the Connecting Lights by Gary Thomas

All the Connecting Lights is a marvel, an homage to the unnoticed and ordinary, a tender and sweeping reckoning of childhood, nature, the mystery of epilepsy, and how our lives and memories intersect. Thomas sees nuances and symmetries that most of us don’t.  I reveled in the joy of “staying lost” and the grace of “spring rationales.”  I’ve been waiting for this book. It is a chronicle of wonder by a truly gifted poet.

–Lee Herrick, author of Scar and Flower

Gary Thomas’ poems range widely and feel deeply.  From his childhood on a Central California peach farm to the tragic Battle of Aleppo to imagined lives and voices of others, Thomas’ poems strike chords of generosity and nostalgia and wonder and, one of his favorite words, grace.  Reading these poems allows us as the readers to take part in worlds that feel at once familiar and lost to us, where Neruda and a farm woman share an unlikely birthday tea, and where we all, in reading each of these portraits of a moment in time, are able to “Gladly bear joy’s burden.”

–Gillian Wegener, author of This Sweet Haphazard

In Gary Thomas’ generous full-length collection All the Connecting Lights, his poetry traverses and pays homage to both real and imaginary landscapes—from the Great Central Valley to a peach farm outside Empire, California to castle rooms “built in the exosphere.”  Striking images abound.  In “Oleanders and Whoopee Cushions,” he writes, “a robin’s burst blue egg / a stiff black widow in her viscous web / earwigs belly up or ready to boil out at a touch.”  These are poems that artfully document moments of the human experience, “Here abide the lost, those / abandoned to swirl among / dust motes, free range sheep, /and unused memory, / whose textures and traces / might still be familiar and felt, / if only in this moment.”  Thomas’ debut collection connects the lights with poetic grace and emotional honesty.

–Maw Shein Win, author of Storage Unit for the Spirit House