Josh Fomon

Josh Fomon's first book: Though We Bleed Meticulously is

disciplined, profusely beautiful yet riven, heartbreaking and heartbroken…Such brilliantdevastation would be hard to bear if it weren't for the visceral ferocity that lurks underneath the words on the page, leaping out of their conjunctions to startle us alive.  This is poetry that is strange, startling and very like the world.”  

Reading his newer collection, “Our Human Shores,” I am struck more than ever by how deeply riven is the world he describes and the “I” that engages with it.  What holds these poems together and makes them oddly beautiful is the care Fomon gives to sound, diction and phrasing:

 

Smooth me into rupture,

stroke microscopic my inflammation—

this layered madness a tinged festoon…

 

Passages like these move up and down registers and shift syntax from phrase to phrase, all the while moving with a faultless ear and measured step.  Fomon’s lyrics give a grave form to his exploration of the interpenetrating, broken self and world that makes his vision ring true.  These are troubled sometimes love poems that open outward to all of us.