Listening to Fish: Meditations from the Wet World

Description

Listening to Fish offers alternatives to arbitrary distinctions between poetry and prose, interrupting the perceived organisation of creative production into classes, providing an original creative contribution to an avid contemporary debate. The sequence “Wall Meditations” functions as a chorus across the collection—you-as-I, as-us—an example of the power of literature to enter our affect cycle, as if it were lived experience. In Listening to Fish I encounter a resplendent conceit—the weft of the underwater world deftly reconstituted through a formidable eye as a meditation upon possibility.

Celebrated American poet and NYU Professor Tim Tomlinson’s Listening to Fish: Meditations from the Wet World is a hybrid collection of poetry and prose (essay, memoir, creative nonfiction). Tomlinson’s stunning new work explores the world of the coral reef through personal history. As diver in the 1970s, he saw the final stages of the marine ecosystem just before it reached the tipping point – “when the species were abundant, the reefs triumphant, and the phantasmagoria vast and dense enough to seem utterly impervious to the careless indifference and rapacious appetites of humankind” – into its steady, dangerous, and deeply depressing decline. He brings the reader inside the minds of the reef’s most dangerous predator—man, and its most repugnant parasite—Cymothoa exigua (the tongue-eating louse), and raises questions about personal responsibility and honest self-assessment. At times playful, at times polemic, yet always provocative, Listening to Fish: Meditations from the Wet World works as both an alarm bell, and an invitation to jump in the pool. Even the most land-locked homebodies will want to dive in and start asking questions.

–Dr. Julia Prendergast, author of the story collections Bloodrust, and The Earth Does Not Get Fat.

In Listening to Fish, Tim Tomlinson journeys into the depths of the ocean and of the self. As this marvelous and unusual book progresses the reader is taken deeper and deeper into the experience of going “over the wall,” into a world of beauty and terror, where life and death come close together, and where we must attend not just to the shimmering silver vision deep in the sea, but to the practicalities and practices that determine whether that vision can continue to remain in view or exist.

–Ruth Danon, Turn Up the Heat

This book is a homage, a requiem, an appeal, but above all, a tender and compelling invitation to strangeness – and deeper listening. In witnessing ‘the magisterial stillness of the barracuda’ and the many eyes that look at you looking at them in ‘a deep Rothko-blue sea’, it becomes a tribute to deeper forms of kinship and non-transactional ways of inhabiting the universe. Here’s a luminous anthem to an exhilarating and terrifying parallel world. And a crash course in learning to live with ‘no agenda but awe.’

–Arundhathi Subramaniam, Women Who Wear Only Themselves and Love Without a Story

Bio

Tim Tomlinson is the author of the chapbook Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse, Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, and the story collection This Is Not Happening to You. Recent work appears in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Live Encounters, Pratik, and Best Asian Short Stories 2023. Tim has lived in the Bahamas, China, England, Italy, the Philippines, Thailand, and various cities in the US, including New Orleans, Boston, Miami, and New York City. He is the director of New York Writers Workshop, and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. He teaches in NYU’s Global Liberal Studies.