Reading/Open Mic & Book Launch for Gary Thomas’s O YES WE BREATHE

O Yes We Breathe is a collection of earthborn connections, a ragged inquiry into our commonalities and yearnings as humans. Divided into four sections (Hard News & Kittens in Trees, If Memory Serves, Liaisons Ordinaires, and Ready to Step Into Waves) these poems address “current” events, the acts of recollection and reminiscence, mortal-to-mortal relationships, and unexpected spiritual encounters and connections. Embedded and resting at rock bottom in this landscape of dusty farms, remnants from news and history, summonings of childhood scraps and souvenirs, and arguments for and within love is the awareness that each of us matters simply because of what we all share.

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Gary Thomas writes with a gentility that belies razor-sharp observations of the human condition, and the humans conditioned to excuse, ignore and embrace it. O Yes We Breathe is stuffed full of poems posing questions. Will you reminisce, nodding in agreement, despair and clench in anger, gasp at a sudden nuance, squirm with uncomfortable recognition? Yeah, you will. But mostly you’ll just marvel…
——Tama L. Brisbane, Literary Arts Consultant, Stockton Poet Laureate Emerita

In his new collection, O Yes We Breathe, Gary Thomas seamlessly weaves days-gone-by boyhood pastoral with the post-pandemic political and spiritual present. Moving between poems, I was transfixed by the gentle music within these pages. “I am beholden to beauty that breathes any way it can—” As inhale, Thomas’ keen eye for detail sharpens the blade of these poems on the sandstone grit of his father’s lessons on life. As exhale, Thomas delivers poignant and tender incantations summoning the deeper, higher self. “If all we ever have is what we trade invisibly in our hulls of flesh and fluidity, we can learn to care for what we have. We can partake our full portion as family. We can breathe easy.” Each poem is a circle within itself “still working with some astonishment,” rippling outward, a whole world. This collection: “Let it light the corners.”
——Kai Coggin, Poet Laureate of Hot Springs, Arkansas, author of Mother of Other Kingdoms and Mining for Stardust

O Yes We Breathe chronicles a poet’s joyful boyhood and explores, with wonder, a changing world. A farmer’s son, Thomas writes with precision and imagination about nature and human nature through the lens of a “sandstone fireplace,” “ten prayer things,” or the miracles of everyday life. He writes, “I wish we were us again instead of our shadows. I wish/ you were the weather and here. I wish I was abundance.” This is a large-hearted poet, a book of abundance, a pleasure through and through.
——Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate, author of In Praise of Late Wonder:
New and Selected Poems and Scar and Flower

Gary Thomas grew up on a peach farm outside Empire, California. Prior to retirement, he taught eighth grade language arts for thirty-one years and junior college English for seven. He has presented poetry workshops for literary organizations, festivals, and conferences. His poems have been published or accepted for publication in The Comstock Review, MockingHeart Review, Atticus Review, River Heron Review, Barzakh, Blue Heron Review, Split Rock Review, Book of Matches, Hole in the Head Review, and The Banyan Review among others, and in the anthology More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets. He is a founding member of the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center (MoSt) and of the Stanislaus County writing group known as The Licensed Fools. A full-length collection, All the Connecting Lights, was released in August 2022 from Finishing Line Press.