Poetry

Tom Kimmel's The Sweetest & The Meanest is now available in paperback,
hardcover and in audio book format!

Audio book also available for digital download!

To purchase and download an e-book version of The Sweetest & the Meanest (to read on your computer or electronic  book reader), visit one of these fine e-book sites:

• ebook Mall
• Powells
• Diesel ebooks
• Books on Board

Featured Poems

Downsizing

No one moves into a smaller place.

It's anti-American!

And moving into a smaller place

with less closet space--

Am I not undermining democracy, 

being a detriment to capitalism?

What is this? Some kind of subliminal

recognition that I'll never be King?

Or am I getting an early start

preparing for the golden years?

Then again, how do I expect the market

to recover if I'm not shopping?

And how can I be sure my country

will remain a superpower if I'm

paying down debt and saving money?

I'm thinking now of how during

the last wave of civil rights unrest

in Alabama, thirty or so years ago,

I was informed that I could be one

of four above-average students

at Wilcox County High School

who would be allowed to skip their

senior year, provided I was willing

to lifeguard at the town pool over

the summer and complete a

self-study economics workbook.

This study, to be honest, 

was a fairly dry exercise, 

but the workbook contained 

one fascinating lesson: A country's 

fiscal well-being is eternally tethered 

to an ever expanding economy.

"How," I asked my supervisor, 

when I turned in my workbook, 

"can growth be limitless on 

a planet with finite resources?"

"Well," he replied, with a pinched look,

having quickly flipped through 

the pages of my workbook

without really looking at them

and scrawling a big red letter 'A'

on the cover, "It's possible, Tom,

but they can't really get into

that in high school economics."

And now, now I'm thinking 

of the ever expanding universe, 

the galaxies moving away from each other

at faster and faster speeds

into cold, infinite space, 

like subdivisions disappearing 

into the south Alabama countryside.

• The Sweetest and The Meanest
• Cannibals
• My Cat

Praise for The Sweetest & the Meanest...

"Denise cried when she read MaMa's Table. I said, 'My goodness, honey! It ain't that good, is it?'"

- Mark Germino


"Tom Kimmel is a treasure. Songman, rocker, poet, seeker, troubadour... always scratching away for the greater truths like a miner for gold. In these poems, you will recognize and celebrate your own humanity " warts and all" and know it's okay to be a human being. Yeah!"

- Marshall Chapman


"Tom does with poems what Eudora Welty did with short stories . . . sweet (but unsentimental), understated little slices of actual human life as experienced here in the south, or anywhere, for that matter. He puts you so close to those beauty/truth/goodness moments of the heart (the ones we've all known but defy description), that you're suddenly in them before you realize it.Like Eudora, he speaks softly, sneaks up on you -- and then nails you. Wonderful stuff."

- Pierce Pettis