Thomas Phalen is an Irish/American dual national, raised in the American West. He is a criminal defense attorney and his practice is devoted mostly to the defense of death penalty cases. He has been writing poetry very nearly all his life, but with a degree of diligent consistency for the last 30 years. He has seven self-published collections of poetry that he has assembled over the past two decades. They are: A Quarter Century After a Late Start, Beatific Visions, Ravaged Angel, Love to Ashes, Mountain Wizard, Achill Sounds, and Alembic. Some of these poems were published in The Lune, Vol. II No. I, Winter 2017, and in The Blue Mountain Review Issue 15, July, 2019. The things he does well are few indeed, but he is a fly-fisher, a poet, a gardener, a marathoner, a student of the French language, an ardent international traveler, and a woodworker. He lives with his beautiful and talented artist wife, Stacie, and their genius Border Collie, Finnbar. They have a house in Phoenix and a cabin in the woods of Flagstaff, Arizona.