Letters to a Stranger: Poems

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The searing collection, a cult favorite for decades, by the late Thomas James

I will last forever. I am not impatient– My skin will wait to greet its old complexions. I’ll lie here till the world swims back again.
–from Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh

Thomas James’s Letters to a Stranger–originally published in 1973, shortly before James’s suicide–has become one of the underground classics of contemporary poetry. In this new edition, with an introduction by Lucie Brock-Broido and four of James’s poems never before published in book form, this fraught and moving masterpiece is at last available.

Letters to a Stranger is a new book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, edited by Mark Doty, dedicated to bringing essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print.