In a recent review on authors' first books, Poet Lore takes a close look at Robert Thomas' new fiction book Bridge. Although Thomas has published previous works of poetry, Bridge is his first published work of fiction. "First books offer the promise of freshness, innovation, and surprise ... It's a rite of passage, that debut, and for a reader it can be a delight," says reviewer Mary-Sherman Willis. "The speaker is Alice, in her early thirties, a legal secretary in a San Francisco law firm (as is Thomas), with an obsessive crush on a married co-worker, David, and a paranoid fear of her boss, Fran. ... But this character, whose intelligence and perceptive apparatus operate in high gear, is deeply credible, unreliable as she might be as a narrator. In densely figurative and psychologically precise language that reminds me of the novelist Nicholson Baker, Thomas manages the interstices of Alice’s thoughts and feelings as they pivot around the gun she buys and what she might do with it." According to the review, Bridge, "which the novelist-poet Laura Kasischke called 'entirely new, shockingly strange, and strangely traditional'—has all the marks of a poet’s creation." Bridge is available now at the BOA Bookstore.