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Reveiw from Booklife.com

A Book of Common Flowers

by Tom Baker

Baker’s poetry debut, following the novel Green, is a botanical collaboration that pays homage to common flowers through delicate watercolor paintings, photography, and prose poems. He structures the collection around the four seasons, offering historical overviews and poetic references for each plant, alongside striking dissections of their origin myths and religious imagery interwoven with erotica. Baker describes his poetry as “finger painting with words,” blending casual observations of ancient medicinal cures and remedies with veiled references to darker happenings, as in the “spider fingers weighted with rubies” that caress and cajole in “Dogwood.”

“Some say Easter Lily was born from Eve’s tears, fleeing the Garden of Eden in disgrace, apple core between her thighs,” Baker writes of the Lilium longiflorum, evoking the famed figure in Genesis while drawing a parallel between her sexual nature and that of the Easter Lily. He attempts to unify concepts that so often have been presented as oppositional—the natural, the sacred, the profane—through such allusions, using subversion to interrogate cultural norms and societal understanding of sexuality. Many of those reflections grow deep roots from Baker’s history with the Catholic Church, as he sifts the purpose of “Jesuits in Tuscan monasteries pray[ing] for reincarnation while daily masturbation sends frustration in isolation” and Sunday offerings disrupted by wanton passions.

Bob Adams’s impressionist-style watercolors are soft-edged, iridescent still lifes that offer a charming visual companion to each of Baker’s pieces, while Charlie Carroll’s photographs provide a stark contrast with their meticulously staged renderings of each flower. Those conflicting visuals reflect the diversity of human perspective in observing nature and ourselves, much like Baker’s realization that his writing allows him “great freedom working with words far from the confines” of more standard fare. Though the prose poems here sometimes lose structural cohesion in their chaotic form, the end result is as unique and affecting as the lush blossoms pirouetting across Baker’s stage.

Takeaway: Prose poems honoring the beauty and passion of flowers.

Comparable Titles: Ross Gay’s “Throwing Children”; Frederick Seidel’s “Hymn to Aphrodite.”

Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A-

Green

Review from Kirkus Reviews

Tom Baker "Green" - Lethe Press 2017

A novel tells the story of a gay Army recruit in the Vietnam era.

In 1967, Tim Halladay has just graduated from college when he gets his draft notice in the mail. His request for a deferment to attend the Yale School of Drama is denied, and he refuses to employ his only other out—the fact that he’s gay. Even straight men are “checking the box” to avoid military service, but Halladay refuses to do the same even if he can’t explain why: “For what? To prove something...that I was as good as the next guy...I would never ‘check the box’ to get out of serving in the military.” The war in Vietnam means this decision may cost him his life, but he nevertheless reports to the Army Training Center at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. From the beginning he is derided as a rich kid and college boy by his fellow recruits, none of whom seem any more pleased to be there than he is.

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by Tom Baker, New York & Bloomington, iUniverse 2012.

Reviewed by Amos Lassen
December 5, 2012

I was lucky enough to meet Tom Baker right after his first book, The Sound of One Horse Dancing, was published. He had come to Provincetown and invited me to have lunch with him and I really enjoyed it (but that in no way influenced my review). One of the things that I really enjoy about Tom Baker is that he had already finished one career when he started a new career as a writer and this gives him the advantage of being able to look back on life and use his own experiences in his writing.

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The Sound of One Horse Dancing
by Tom Baker. iUniverse, 2011

Reviewed by Amos Lassen
September 3, 2012

Tim Halladay seems to have it all. He is vice president of an ad agency (the first he interviewed with), he is the toast of Madison Avenue and he has achieved a great deal in only five years. He has taken over some of the most prestigious accounts of the 1970s. But then ... a week before Thanksgiving everything changed, and after spending a night of booze and sex, he gets to work late and is fired with no explanation. He was low on cash and could not even pay his rent, and he knows that he must find a way to deal with his lack of a job. He begins to think back on his life - his unstable childhood, his time in the military, his high school affair with Karen, his girlfriend, his college education at William and Mary, his move to New York and his first advertising job and of himself as a closeted gay man in that period when Stonewall became a symbol of liberation.

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KIRKUS REVIEWS

iUniverse (212 pp.)
$24.95 Hardcover
$14.95 Paperback

October 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-1450271271

When a young, wildly successful ad executive is unexpectedly fired from a 1970s Madison Avenue ad agency, he must come to terms with his closeted identity as a Stonewall-era gay man and differentiate the truly meaningful from the inconsequential in Baker's debut.

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