Tom Griffin was the first person I met on my first day of my first residency at Pacific University's MFA program, and I've always been grateful for the way he helped me feel comfortable and welcome as we waited in line to check in, and then for the next ten days of workshops, and the semesters that followed.
In 2018, he spent 205 days walking across America, and wrote a book about it, With a Good Heart, as well as this companion volume of 100 poems, Imagine the Sea. The poems in Imagine the Sea are thoughtful and thought-provoking, sometimes wry and sometimes heart-breaking. They are short poems, arranged by the states he crossed in his walk, interspersed with fantastic snapshots of some of the things he saw along the way. But the slightness of the poems is misleading. They have a heft to them. I am not the same person I was before I read this book. Or, as I tweeted: "100 small poems, one big impact." Thank you, Tom.
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