Gaze of Thunder

By Eddy Toussaint Tontongi

This book of poems and essays consists of four parts, the first containing poems that codify memories of the Trump candidacy and administration from the years 2016 to 2021. Those poems also register and encompass the heroic and persevering resistance the people mounted to counter the nightmarish event.

The second part lays out a series of short, conceptual poems and texts, impregnated with philosophical insights and lyrical reasoning that mix prosaic form and poetic symphony. This part captures what I call the fugitive moments, those that come l'improviste, unexpectedly, in the contingency of everyday living, in the slow passing of time. The poems in the first part, as well in the second, can deservedly be construed in phenomenological fashion as a kind of anthropological poetics or an-thropopoetics, evidentiary revelation of the poet's being there, in the United States, in that particular moment. Being there at the moment when History is being written, being there as part of a complex world within the USA

The third part includes poems conceived and composed during the Covid-19 pandemic, giving a window into my affect of the time. How could a poet live those dreadful and macabre moments and not put down something on paper? The same is true for the fourth (and last) part of the book: How could I live the genocidal horrors in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and not put down something on paper?

As both a consciousness coming from the other side of the Western hemisphere living in otherness, and the embodiment, as a poet, of universal value of human transcendence and elevation, the poet wants his poetry to be not a mere anti-Trump poetics, but rather a poetics that honors the humanist finality of our political engagement. How could poetry exist in the Trump era? To pose the question that way becomes equivalent to saying: How could poetry have existed and survived in the Hitler era? Unlike Theodor Adorno's original assertion (later reconsidered) that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," poetry is in itself a potent element and means for wisdom and resistance.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1936431467
• ISBN13: 9781936431465
• Release Date: October 2025
• Publisher: Trilingual Press
• Length: 194 Pages
• Weight: 0.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"