People I Can't or Won't Have Another Conversation With

The People in the title of Alexander Thorne's new book are both living and dead, but this also refers to the fact that we all carry fragments of the living and dead within ourselves. "In the center, transcendent, are old ghosts," so begins People I Can't or Won't Have Another Conversation With. "They look at me from across the room./ They're like stars—when you look at them/they are hard to see but when they enter/your peripheral vision—there they are."

Thorne's poems explore the bridges between the physical world where we live and the collective unconscious where we dream (and where we keep both our dead and the collected fragments of our past), blending reality with the surreal. As Fyodor Dostoyevsky once wrote, "Nothing helps a man to reform like thinking of the past with regret." Poems such as these confirm David Bain's observation of Thorne's poetry that "...his work is more sharp, insightful and intriguing than anything I was writing at the same age."