The Rest of the Way

Tom Laughlin is a professor at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts where he teaches creative writing, literature, and composition courses, as well as coordinating the MCC Visiting Writers Series and open readings and contests featuring students, faculty, staff, and community members for the Creative Writing Program. He was a founding editor of Vortext, a literary journal of Massasoit Community College, and a volunteer staff reader for many years for Ploughshares. He has also taught literature classes in two Massachusetts prisons. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Green Mountains Review, Ibbetson Street, Drunk Monkeys, Sand Hills Literary Magazine, The Blue Mountain Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, North Essex Review, Middlesex Magazine, The Dead River Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, Superpresent Magazine, Rockvale Review, Molecule, and elsewhere. He has also published academic articles in Teaching English in the Two-Year College and elsewhere, as well an annual calendar, Stone Balancing at Walden Pond, featuring photos of his stone balancing. An avid hiker, pond swimmer, and Ultimate Frisbee player, he lives in Framingham, Massachusetts. His website is TomLaughlinPoet.com

Tom Laughlin takes us outdoors in poetry that brims with the natural elements-we are immersed in New England landscapes with a town green, a mistress moon, snowy woods lined with elfin ski tracks, and swimmable water in every form, which conjures joy and jazz, a Great White, and a night-time pipe-smoking fisherman. Haunting the collection, like a familiar ache, is a wounded and wounding father. Death and tragedy slip in around tender stories of swimming a grasshopper to safety, climbing pencil pines, and James Wright's hammock. Laughlin's collection invites us to"[bob] in a universe of stars" as we ponder 'the rest of the way.'Mary Buchinger, author of e i n f ü h l u n g/in feeling and president of the New England Poetry Club