The Chain

After One and Waking established Tom Sleigh as one of the most original and accomplished poets in contemporary America. In The Chain, Sleigh explores the nature of memory—its uncanny ability to recast events in contradictory ways as it links individual lives to history. The poet reveals the ways in which the individual consciousness, alternately resisting and embracing its ancestral legacy, seeks to transform, in order to comprehend, the meaning of cultural inheritance. In a series of elegi...