Carl Phillips
'We are invented/by what we let pass through us,' says Amber Flora Thomas. Just so, the world is invented anew as it passes through this poet's wryly fixed and clear eye, to be returned to us via the poet's decidedly original voice, as it sings to us of that incidental landscape, the body-the body as it routinely 'betrays its own purpose.' And we forgive it, we trust in it again. Which is to say this is also a book about faith and the human struggle for it. An impressive debut.
Yusef Komunyakaa
It is wonderful to see that Amber Flora Thomas's Eye of Water isn't a blurred vision, that it indeed enlightens through mature reflection and measured insight. This lyrical voice knows water as life and redemption, and each line here seems like a divining rod that shows us where personal and public truths are found. Eye of Water is a rewarding tour de force.
Molly Peacock
In Eye of Water Amber Flora Thomas has written one of her generation's best first books. 'We are invented/by what we let pass through us,' Thomas says, and a sensory world passes through her poems-regal, yet warm, majestic and domestic, sophisticated, emotional, and wise. Intensely crafted, Thomas's poems thrive on multiple levels of truths in myriad angles. They are literally dazzling. Thomas makes a breathtaking debut with this collection.