Tom Sleigh’s books include The King’s Touch (Graywolf Press); House of Fact, House of Ruin; Staton Zed; Army Cats; and Space Walk. His most recent book of essays, The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing in the Age of Refugees, recounts his time as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Lila Wallace Award recipient, and has received two NEA grants in poetry. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Threepenny Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and many other magazines. He is a distinguished professor in the MFA program at Hunter College in New York. In The King’s Touch, Sleigh’s poems are charged with a powerful sense of premonition. Justice is a prevailing force, even while the poems are fully aware of the refugee crisis, war, famine, and the brutal reality of a crowded hospital morgue. Here, the world of fact collides into the world of mystery with a resolutely secular register. The title poem refers to the once-held belief that the king, as a divine representative, is imbued with the power of healing touch. Sleigh turns this encounter between illness and human contact toward his chronic blood disease and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its mounting death tolls.
