Caroline O'Connor Thomas is a poet currently residing in the Bay Area. In 2014, she received her MFA from St. Mary's College of California. Following graduation, she attended the Tin House Summer Workshop as a Poetry Scholar. Her work has appeared in Salt Hill, Tin House, Sixth Finch, 580 Split & others. She sleeps and writes in Oakland, CA. Unusual Light Source is her first chapbook. carolineoconnorthomas.com

“​Caroline O’Connor Thomas’s bewitching, hexavalent poems roam city streets, grocery stores, and Mesa, Arizona, remembering to be curious and suspicious of light, love, wide open spaces, to wear ‘newly mad animal,’ to be bewildered.  Through sleep and waking, through ‘The new mobility of everything’, Unusual Light Source offers an invigorating, gorgeous ride.”
-Mary Cisper, author of Dark Tussock Moth

”The intensity, wild precision, humor, fierce intelligence, and original thinking of these poems is stunning. These are the knockout poems of a new surrealist, continually rediscovering the old lesson that her world is equally as interesting as her imagination, and language itself. In love and despair and hope this poet careens from experience to experience, and we get to ride along, a great vertiginous privilege. Buy and treasure this book: it is the herald of an important new voice in American poetry.”
-Matthew Zapruder, author of Why Poetry

”In Unusual Light Source Caroline O’Connor Thomas gives the reader what might otherwise seem ineffable, a preservation of innocence, a speaker whose vulnerability bursts with glee, humor and terror. Clever moments bare emotive surges, so that just as the reader smiles at a maneuver like a punctuation mark as imagery, they also feel the benefits of “Sunlight in Recommended Doses.” Lines meet the page with a high tone “velocity”, dark, funny, and totally exposed all at once. Read these rooms. They have good light.”
-Sara Mumolo, author of Day Counter and Mortar​