A Larger Country (Apr Honickman 1st Book Award)

"Tomás Morín's poems are as infectious and spooky and darkly humorous as the Brothers Grimm, as shapely and colloquial and eloquent as John Donne, and as skeptical and addicted to history-as-fable as Zbigniew Herbert."—Tom Sleigh, from the introduction

"An energetic and moving book of fantasias and elegies."—Edward Hirsch

Selected from over one thousand manuscripts for the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Tomás Q. Morín's debut is rich with the mastery of Morín's lush storytelling. From war-torn images of Eastern Europe in the mid-1900s to modern-day glimpses of the American southwest, these poems are bold and brightly imagined.

From "Castrato":

What do you call a gifted soprano

with no balls who is too ugly

to play the heroine, is never tall enough

for the role of the hero? Wait a quarter century

and you can fast forward past the floggings,

the endless sermons, the giggles under alders

with curious girls, busted noses, carped

sisters with chubby boys, the innumerable

nights of sleeplessness. Better to skip all this

unpleasantness and descend the last rise

toward the coast where you can stroll the docks

in the short light of winter, get lost

in the cloudbank, let the sea ripen

in your hair, scan the flat water

for the handsome young men . . .

Tomás Q. Morín was born in Texas and educated at Texas State University and Johns Hopkins University. He lives in San Marcos, Texas, and teaches at Texas State University.

Tom Sleigh: Tom Sleigh won the 2008 Kingsley Tufts Award for his book of poetry, Space Walk (Houghton Mifflin). His book of essays, Interview with a Ghost, was published by Graywolf Press in 2006. Sleigh has won the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and grants from the Lila Wallace Fund, American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy in Berlin, the Guggenheim Fourndation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2011 he received the inaugural John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City.