Baron Wormser Book Launch: "Tom o'Vietnam"

The former poet laureate of Maine presents his new novel, Tom o'Vietnam, with a reading, talk, Q&A, book signing, and refreshments. Free and open to the public.

About the book:

“In Tom o’Vietnam, Baron Wormser has created a stunning literary mash-up of a soldier’s fractured survival co-mingled with Shakespeare’s King Lear. This commanding narrative explores the pilgrimage of a young veteran who roams America as if it will lead him to King Lear’s plains of Dover. Mired in ‘the poetry of incomprehension,’ Tom wanders in a helix spun with the intricacies of words and the spaces between them, grappling with the tragedy of Lear to find his way. I was thoroughly engaged in this richly layered story and was equally rewarded to witness a tenderness of love that underscores Tom’s odyssey, and the surprise of my own emotions overcome with a rare kind of love for this character and this book.”

—Eugenia Kim, author of The Calligrapher’s Daugher

Read a review from Solstice Literary Magazine HERE.

About the author:

Baron Wormser is the author/co-author of fifteen books and a poetry chapbook. His books include Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems (Sarabande Books), The Road Washes Out in Spring: a Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid (University Press of New England), and The Poetry Life: Ten Stories (CavanKerry Press). His novel Tom o’ Vietnam, about a Vietnam veteran who is obsessed with King Lear, was published by New Rivers Press in the fall of 2017. Wormser has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 2000 to 2005 he served as poet laureate of the state of Maine. He has taught many dozens of workshops across the United States and continues to offer generative workshops in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction along with workshops focusing on the works of a particular poet. He teaches in the Fairfield University MFA Program and lives with his wife Janet in Montpelier, Vermont.