Rabbits Could Sing - The

Poems

by Thomas, Amber Flora

The poems included in The Rabbits Could Sing delve farther into territory that Amber Flora Thomas visited in her prize-winning book Eye of Water, showing even more clearly how “the seam has been pulled so far open on the past” that “the dress will never close.” Here, the poem acts not as a body in itself but as a garb drawn around the here and now. Loss, longing, and violation are sustenance to a spirit jarred from its animal flesh and torn apart, unsettling the reader with surprising images that are difficult to forget. The poems in The Rabbits Could Sing invite the reader into a world thick with the lush bounty of summer in the Far North, where the present is never far from the shadow of the past.

Amber Flora Thomas is the author of Eye of Water: Poems, and her poems have appeared in Callaloo, Orion Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Literary Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among other publications.

Thomas has such a fine eye for details that even the ordinary task of carrying shopping bags into the house is made marvelous by her attention to the heft of groceries... the redeeming fact Thomas comes back to time and time again is that our life is ours and it is made better by the attention it can be paid.

—Eloise Klein Healy, author of The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho and Artemis in Echo Park

With The Rabbits Could Sing, Amber Flora Thomas continues her upward arc in the world of poetry. . . Readers of modern poetry and lovers of nature should find much to enjoy in this collection, wherein the rabbits sing, and they sing beautifully.

—ForeWord Reviews