Robert Thomas' first book, Door to Door (Fordham University Press, 2002), was chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa as the winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize, and in 2003 he received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has published poems in The Atlantic Monthly, Field, The Iowa Review, New England Review, and many other magazines.

About Dragging the Lake:

"Robert Thomas knows what a frenulum is, and the skills a shoemaker needed in 1623. His range of reference and imagery is wide, including music (classical and popular), history, and the hard sciences, and from these he makes poems unlike anyone else’s. He can be lyrically contemporary, or speak in extended narratives through the personae of Leoš Janácek, Jakob Boehme, and Jacqueline du Pré. Dragging the Lake is richly textured, various, deeply satisfying, and snazzy."
—Brendan Galvin

"A far-ranging mind made these poems, one in which intelligence and imagination combine in a rare ability to reason with imagery and sound. That may seem a familiar definition of poetic talent, but in these poems it gives the voice an authority that’s both reliable and constantly surprising. Thomas can enter another consciousness, century, or personal history with as much facility as he moves through his own life and world. Thus, although many poems are written in persona, they feel more like an inhabitation than a trick of ventriloquism. Yet for all its interest in the mind’s capacity to travel outside of itself, this is poetry written in the pure American English of the present moment. Dragging the Lake is smart, funny, moving, and profound."
—Chase Twichell