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.