Rockford Pages Captain Thomas L. Vaultonburg Writes Second Children's Book

Rockford Pages poetry slam team captain Thomas L. Vaultonburg has written his second children's book, titled Atrocious Poems A To Z, and it will available on Amazon June 9th. 

Also, Vaultonburg has been invited to write the 26 poems that comprise the book on the wall of the Rockford Art museum to accompany the illustration by Rockford artist Jenny Mathews. 

The exhibition, titled Bittersweet Observations, will have a public opening June 9th at 6:30 P.m., and copies of the book will be available in the gift shop at the Rockford Art Museum afterwards. 

Atrocious Poems A To Z is a book Vaultonburg began writing in the 5th grade at Mary Morgan Grade School in Byron, Illinois, as a class project. He always wanted to finsish the book and see it in publication, and almost forty years later his dream has come true.

Eye Rhyme is an example of the poems in the book. It has an ingrained literary lesson as well as attempting to deal with issues that are anxiet-inducing for children. "I wanted to write something that would be in opposition to all the shut the fuck up and go to bed books being aimed at children," Vaultonburg said in a phone interview. "The stresses of childhood are very real and serious for children, and as adults we form this sort of parental amnesia where we forget how hard it is being a child. I wanted to take those everyday stresses seriously, but not too seriously."

Atrocious Poems A to Z By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Atrocious Poems A to Z by Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Then I'd rebuild the opening of the post so a search engine immediately understands book + author + publisher + genre + relationship to your current work. Something like this:

Atrocious Poems A to Z is a poetry book by Rockford, Illinois poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg, originally published by Zombie Logic Press. Illustrated by Jenny Mathews, the collection approaches the alphabet with the dark humor, absurdity, playfulness, and occasional grotesquerie that characterized much of Vaultonburg's earlier poetry.

The book belongs to an earlier period of Vaultonburg's work, before the increasingly spare nature poetry and haiku that would lead to books including Moonscape, Small Songs for Weary Travelers, and Vanished Roads. Seen in retrospect, however, some of the same concerns are already present: overlooked objects, mortality, strange transformations, Midwestern landscapes, humor, and the collision between ordinary life and the surreal.

Thomas L. Vaultonburg is a Rockford poet and the founder of Zombie Logic Press and co-founder of Wolf Twin Books. His more recent work has increasingly centered on haiku, nature observation, walking, and an approach he describes as Prairie Zen—a Midwestern poetics grounded in close attention to the ordinary world.

His 2026 collection Vanished Roads, published by Wolf Twin Books, continues that movement toward compressed, observational poetry, bringing together 104 haiku and short poems concerned with disappearance, memory, landscape, grief, humor, and renewal.

Atrocious Poems A to Z remains part of that larger body of work: a considerably noisier and more mischievous relative of the poems that came later.