Letters to a Stranger Poems

The searing collection, a cult favorite for decades, by the late Thomas James I will last forever. I am not impatient My skin will wait to greet its old complexions. I'll lie here till the world swims back again. from "Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh" Thomas James'sLetters to a Strangeroriginally published in 1973, shortly before James's suicidehas become one of the underground classics of contemporary poetry. In this new edition, with an introduction by Lucie Brock-Broido and four of James's poems never before published in book form, this fraught and moving masterpiece is at last available. Letters to a Strangeris a new book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, edited by Mark Doty, dedicated to bringing essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print.

Thomas James (1946–74) was from Joliet, Illinois. Letters to a Stranger, which won the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest in 1969, was his only book of poetry.

“Letters to a Stranger is a book of dark intensities and deeply felt connections, both haunted and haunting, at once brooding, sensual and lucid . . . The voice in these poems—painfully lonely and filled with longing, estranged and religious—has stayed with me for more than twenty years. It deserves to be remembered.” —Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post