Door to Door
By Robert Thomas
Selected by Yusef Komunyakaa
Door to Door ranges from the wry romance of “Changing the Oil” (“You make love the way you change the oil in your Oldsmobile”) to the salesman in the title poem who sees “what the glacier sees in the onslaught of spring.” The poems stand at the crossroads of mystery and love, hoping to trade their soul for Federico García Lorca’s guitar, or perhaps Jimi Hendrix’.
“This is a fresh, inventive, and moving book. The speaker here enters into a world, exploring, with an engaging openness and fullness of detail, a range of perspectives different from his own. At the same time, he acknowledges wishes the world can never fulfill, wishes he presents with a witty and exuberant loyalty. The dialogue that results is richly engaging.”
— Carl Dennis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
“The poems in this brilliant and urgent first collection traverse the territory between feverish delirium and remarkable sanity. In Door to Door, the lost voices of goddesses as well as salesmen are invoked, and Mozart stands comfortably beside Our Lady Of Baby Back Ribs; Emily Dickinson is called back from the dead and taken on a sight-seeing trip around San Francisco. Robert Thomas is a poet for the 21st century – witty, worried, and ecstatic – and this is a collection that will last.”
— Laura Kasischke, author of four books or poetry, including What It Wasn’t