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Thomas Heise shows himself to be a poet of enormous resourcefulness in Horror Vacui. Poem after poem reimagines itself formally, driven not only by imaginative restlessness but also, impressively, felt need. It is as if each poem honors the emotional vividness of individual experiences with its own true shape. These are ambitious, moving poems, deft, panged, and stunning.
—Dean Young
Horror Vacui offers an often vertiginous account of how death imposes [an] irresistible fact on minds bent on both accommodating and resisting this one inevitable yet impossible truth. . . . And it's this property of being barely held together that makes Horror Vacui so striking. . . . an extraordinary mood piece.
—Ray McDaniel, The Constant Critic
In his haunting debut collection Horror Vacui, Thomas Heise explores a fear of empty space, a mysterious and abiding absence that is a pronounced presence in the poet's lyrical voice. "There is ash in the air, as I go / forth in daylight, as I wade home / at evensong. . . ./ In my hand I hold / a tuning fork and clang the weather / vane, I strike my hand on the garden / wall . . ." In Horror Vacui the human song provides little solace in a world where "there is nowhere to fly to." Abandoned dogs, vacant rooms, dismantled snowmen, obituaries, calla lilies, a "zero so large you could crawl through it"—all form the "pattern of wreckage /scattered around us" that Heise turns into his own brand of lonely music. With unflagging determination, Heise honors and transforms experience in lyrics that elegize, exorcise, and renew. This is a remarkably elegant book of poems.
Thomas Heise was born in northern Michigan, but raised in Southern Florida. He holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California at Davis and a Ph.D. in American Literature from New York University, where he also taught as a Lecturer. His poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Gulf Coast, The Journal, Ploughshares, Slope, Verse, Modern Fiction Studies, and in the BioCritique series. He has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from the University of California, New York University, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In 2004, he received the Gulf Coast Prize for Poetry. Currently he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where he is writing a second book of poetry and finishing a study on twentieth-century urban American culture and literature.
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