Tom Sleigh - The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees & House of Fact, House of Ruin: Poems — in conversation with Joshua Weiner — at Politics and Prose at The Wharf
In The Land Between Two Rivers, his second collection of essays, Sleigh trades his poet’s hat for the flak jacket of a journalist, reporting from war zones and refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia, and Iraq. Striving for “an art in which bodily reality isn’t slighted,” Sleigh focuses on the lives of individuals and details their experiences of war, displacement, illness, and hope. He complements this reportage with probing, personal meditations on the role and responsibilities of art in divisive times, questions he refines further in the poems of House of Fact, House of Ruin. Sleigh’s tenth collection shows the poet as both socially engaged and self-aware, struggling “to see the filthiness / that keeps making me filthy” and to do something about it. Sleigh will be in conversation with Joshua Weiner, author of three collections of poetry and Berlin Notebook, prose about the refugee crisis.
