Tenderfoot

About the Book

Thomas’ flinty new collection of poems, Tenderfoot, spanning forty years, hammers home the idea of expanding the view of landscape to include the self. Witness “Climbing Through A Deeper Silence” or the pilot’s vertigo in “Detail from a Combat Flight,” or the view from under the sea in “Fear of Singing.” Some, in fixed forms and written at the start of the poet’s journey, get to breathe again after years of incubation. Journey, pushing on into the interior, alone or with witness, seeking pause, and finally the end of looking, defines the great sweep of the book. And get a load of “Search by Posse”—maybe the best straight up, relentless narrative poem by an American since Dick Hugo. It alone is worth the price of the book. Let’s hope this will put readers on notice that some poets who choose to self-publish really know which end is up. —Geoff Peterson, Fiery Messengers (an Authorhouse imprint)

About the Author

George Thomas was born during the Great Depression on October 20, 1937 in Dayton, Ohio. At the time of his birth, Dayton was the 50th largest city in America, a busy manufacturing center. It was the home of more tool and die shops than any other city on the globe. Dayton was also the home of National Cash Register Company which, at the time, was the largest company of its kind in the world. "Anyplace you travel around the globe," he bragged in an early autobiographical sketch, "you can find a huge, brassy NCR cash registers banging away, adding up consumer spending." These days, he notes those times are long past. At 17 in 1955, George Thomas enlisted and served in a peacetime Navy. After his tour of duty, the writer worked at a dizzying variety of jobs in the interior or on one coast or another of America. He was a window decorator, a delivery driver, a factory and shipyard worker, a teaching assistant, a job shop machinist, a salesman and 7-11 clerk, a Certified Nurse’s Aid in a nursing home, a teacher in colleges and one high school, a janitor and a dishwasher. For a time, Thomas served in an elected position as the director of a housing facility for veterans, and he spent several months as a painter and sandblaster’s helper on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. He worked with “troubled” youths at a live-in facility in Springfield, Ohio. Along the way, the writer earned a couple of Master’s degrees (one an MFA in Creative Writing) and three divorces and four marriages as well. The writer boasts that he has made next to nothing out of the degrees he earned and not a lot more out of most of the jobs he worked at. According to the author, he never strayed far from his roots in a manufacturing town, for the most part earning his daily bread as a machinist, mostly as a mill hand. Retired happily now, he lives happily with his 4th wife and, at last, soul mate, Mertie Duncan. In recent years, the author has developed a significant interest in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology which he says explain the Cosmos and the behavior of the human species far more adequately than any of religions' many contradictory moral guesstimations. One of the authors who best express Mr. Thomas's world view is Kurt Vonnegut.