Far Cry by Tom Daley

The chapbook was published by Ethel Press in 2022.

Tom Daley sets the stakes for Far Cry, his chapbook in response to the death of a close friend with whom he had become estranged, in a poem title: “I Address the Virtual Impossibility of Conjuring You with Verses that Are Merely Descriptive.” There is no “mere” in this intimate, ambivalent conjuring of the relationship of two gay friends. Daley exposes all the oscillations of desire and loss: “All your gone whispers / are grinning me down. All / your licked grimaces ferrying / me off to some speedway / of snicker and frown…”. He reanimates elegy with “slicing shade…mincing mischief,” luring us into the friend’s seductive aura, half fellow marauder, half cruel queenly task master: “Here, old contender, / bring me your scalding / sashay. Bring me your / scolding sense of the proper / alignment of recent trends/ in thermals and socks…”.

—Judson Evans, co-author of Chalk Song