from the Acknowledgments:

"I have always taken to heart Sarah Orne Jewett’s writing advice to
Willa Cather: “. . . you must find your own quiet center of life, and
write from that to the world.” Gathering work for a new collection
of my own poems, I noticed how they clustered around the places
where I had lived and worked for most of my professional career.
I have had the good fortune of living the last fifty years of my life
in Kansas, then Indiana, then Minnesota, then North Dakota,
and then back to Minnesota, with brief detours in Nebraska and
Winnipeg, Manitoba—most of the moves prompted by career
changes in academia. For AURORA, I have gathered poems that
were conceived, born, raised, and sent out into the world from
these times and places. Looking at these poems from the arc of my
writing life, I realize how much they are “image driven.” I suspect
this has something to do with the way in which I’ve grown to
write over the years. The notebooks that I carry are mostly filled
with words and phrases quickly jotted down for future reference. I
also engage in an exercise I call “sensory inventory,” whereby
I list words or phrases of the things I see, hear, smell, touch, or
taste. Later, when I return to my notebooks, some of those images
find their way into poems. Seasonal names and references often
appear in poems. Perhaps I unconsciously learned this from the
haiku poets?"

Published by North Dakota State University Press (2026)

“Thom Tammaro’s new book, Aurora, is a shimmering witness to his bond with a place that he has come to know and obviously love. His stories about that day along the Red River, dry pods of milkweed, harvest time, hunters, closing the cabin, waiting for the first snowfall, and the demise of the buffalo are evidence of how much he has become a part of the Dakota’s open horizon. The poems are beautiful and follow seasonal changes tending more to the autumnal and wintery, appropriate for a poet writing out of the Red River Valley. We see real night hawks “above the roof of the old science building at the university.” We see buffalo on the hills and meadows “sway like tall black grass,” and when we’re finished with considering the “voices of escape or return, ” we can love the “pods of milkweed/ Red pine, blazing stars/ The purple clusters of September.” Besides this beautiful book (there have been three previous collections and two chapbooks), it’s time to celebrate Tammaro’s contribution to the literary life of the area. He has edited and curated many anthologies of thematic tributes, as well as a collection of Minnesota women poets from territorial days to the present. Working on that anthology with Thom and Connie Wanek was one of the delights of my literary career. Thom is a gem, a guiding star, and a guy who will spend hours to get your car started in a polar vortex snow storm. The same creative energy that made this beautiful book of poems floods Thom’s work in other areas, especially those that contribute to the literary world of the upper Midwest, shimmering and bright as any aurora.”

—Joyce Sutphen, former Minnesota Poet Laureate and author of Carrying Water to the Field: New and Selected Poems.