Aftermath

About Thomas March

Thomas March is a poet, teacher and critic based in New York City. His poetry has appeared in many journals, including Bellevue Literary Review, The Good Men Project, Pleiades, and Public Pool. His reviews and essays have appeared in The Believer, The Huffington Post, and New Letters. Appearing regularly in Lambda Literary Review, his poetry column, “Appreciations,” offers close readings of poems from recent collections by LGBTQ poets. Recipient of the Norma Millay Ellis Fellowship in Poetry from the Millay Colony for the Arts, he has also received an Artist/Writer grant from The Vermont Studio Center.

Praise for Aftermath

I love the intimacy and lyric intensity of Thomas March’s poems. Though one source of their power is understatement, they’re anything but evasive: A telling detail exposes feelings denied or suppressed in an erotic encounter; a metaphor brings an unresolved–and unresolvable–conflict into clear focus. March’s mastery of verse forms offers the twofold pleasure of inevitability and surprise, as sentences dance with and against the metrical and syllabic patterns he has laid down. Formal tension permits unexpected music. And moral tension, as in many of the poems’ scenarios, allows readers, too, to consider the ways we collude with silence.
—Joan Larkin

Hindsight opens the door to insight in Thomas March’s Aftermath, an emotionally intelligent book that invites us to mine the rubble of “this world/that always wants repair.” The natural rhythms of iambic pentameter pace the heartbeat of this journey toward queer identity, troubled masculinity, and those unsettling truths that illuminate and disorient consciousness, like “dark stars against the warm, awaiting light.” A superb debut.
—Rigoberto González