Likenesses

"It's almost impossible to explain why the playfulness of Heather Tone's Likenesses produces such delight. . . . Freedom, light, leggerezza, speed, and depth. Crystal abyss, 'nothing, ' a touch of kabala. Perfect projections of shades between death and life, a scent of Eden. Like four-year-old boys throwing clumps of mud at each other, bursting into happy laughter. These lines scream with joy." --Boston Review

Likenesses was selected by Nick Flynn for the prestigious Honickman First Book Award. In his introduction he writes: "Likenesses is made up of five sequences of poems, many of which use the engine of simile to drive them forward. Running alongside this simile-generating machine, there is something also here of Genesis--the book is, in part, an origin myth, an attempt to create the world by naming it."

Likenesses

When he is dead, a man in a

bathing suit looks most like a little boy.

A woman in a bathing suit

looks like a woman, unless she is quite

thin, in which case she looks like a little boy.

A little girl in a sundress looks like a little boy

in a sundress. Her mouth is a cold oval, as cold

as a strawberry. When dead, a robin red-breast

looks like a little girl, while it goes without

saying that Robin Hood looks like a boy . . .

Heather Tone's poetry has appeared in The Boston Review, The Colorado Review, Fence, and other journals. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she currently lives in Florida.