In his poetry collection WAKING UP AT THE GATES: POEMS OF RECOVERY, HEALING, & TRANSFORMATION, Thomas Kudla chronicles a journey from constraint to freedom, from suffering to healing, and from isolation to connection—finding humor and transcendence in the fierce interior landscapes of the imagination. He employs a range of typefaces and visual elements to mirror and amplify his poems’ thematic concerns. Namely, the search for meaning and spiritual wholeness in a world that often feels absurd and hostile to the individual spirit; the yearning for connection and community in an age of isolation, polarization, and hyper-individualism; and the role of art and the artist in resisting conformity.
The collection’s first poem, “NewLEAF,” urges the reader to embrace a sense of possibility and potential in the face of failure and hardship: “Life is only worth living if you are willing to persevere and keep trying regardless of previous mistakes or setbacks.” The following poem, “Do Nothing,” introduces the reader to Kudla’s penchant for irreverent wordplay and typographical idiosyncrasies as it repeats the phrase “Do nothing”—cycling through variations (“Do no thing,” “Do know thing,” “Do know nothing”) in a meditation on knowing, being, and nothingness.
Kudla’s inventiveness is a crucial component of his poetic vision. The fractured mosaic of “One of Those Long-Lost Puzzle Pieces” is a playful reflection on the poet’s sense of dislocation: “kids think / I’m lame / while the elderly / think I’m weird.” There is also “Thank you for reading, Friend,” a prose poem in the form of a personal letter detailing his liberation from the need for external validation or material success. In these works and others, Kudla combines formal experimentation with confessional vulnerability to convey the restless energy of a mind struggling to derive meaning from life’s messiness.
WAKING UP AT THE GATES is about resilience, renewal, and the mind’s ability to alchemize suffering into art—chaos into meaning. Formally adventurous but sincere and open-hearted, Kudla’s verse embodies the fundamental human hunger for meaning and connection on the journey toward authenticity and awakening. To read these poems is to discover (in the author’s words) “something absolutely / sublime & very nearly divine” amid the wreckage of the quotidian, and to emerge from the experience forever changed.
With self-deprecating wit, accessible language, and flashes of hard-won enlightenment, Thomas Kudla’s WAKING UP AT THE GATES: POEMS OF RECOVERY, HEALING, & TRANSFORMATION finds unexpected wisdom and humor in the rituals of the everyday.
~Edward Sung for IndieReader