Reclaimed Water

In Reclaimed Water, his second full-length collection of poems, Tom Snarsky rinses the familiar and holds it up, glistening, to the light. With off-beat humor and a refusal to ignore our own complicity in creating the current precarious crossroads, he articulates a poetics devoted to awareness that author and readers alike are inextricable from a complex of flows connecting everything on this planet. How might we save our damaged world (and selves) if we go beyond the binary of resource and waste? By Snarsky's reckoning, reclamation is a form of care. What's used and discarded persists, our textual ephemera also, as flotsam taken up and given new purpose inseparable from the old. Reclaimed Water is the work of a poet living in the present, restlessly searching for answers to vexing questions. Snarsky's poems are both serious and playful; they frequently break free of their confines. The many-gendered mothers of poetry (& the poet) are omnipresent, influences undisguised, and the dead welcomed in like lost friends.