Jeffrey Thomson's newest book is a chapbook of poems called Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge out from RopeWalk Press in 2007.

Also recent are Renovation (from Carnegie Mellon University Press) and Blind Desire, a limited edition artist's book with photographs by Dennis Marisco produced by Dionysus Press in association with The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, PA.

His second collection, The Country of Lost Sons, innagurated a new poetry series at Parlor Press (Purdue University) in 2004.

Listen to audio versions of selected poems:

From CLS
New Poems
From Renovation

Praise for Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge

“The words churn in Jeffrey Thomson’s imaginative poems. The impulse to catalog, to embrace through language, is given free reign in a book that gives life to the fascinating categories of knowledge that come to us from Borges’s ‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.’ The sheer appetite of these poems, their intellectual drive and rhythmic insistence, conveys an almost physical sense of the poet’s curiosity, a wonder that deepens, over the course of the book, to a conveyance of his love for the fullness of the natural world.”
—Bob Hicok

“That Jeffrey Thomson’s fabulous and fabulist Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge creates an enchanting world within our own world puts him in the company of Calvino, Borges and Cervantes, but that he also inserts our own world into the fabulous one makes this collection an amazing feat. He has it, that is, both ways. Working from Borges’s idea of an imaginary taxonomy of all plants and animals, each poem introduces us to a new creature that is also a mirror of ourselves. Indeed, the poems are filled with such radical leaps so that we start to ask with him—‘How to count?’ but of course we can’t, for the poems suggest an endless cascade of surprising turns. ‘I could write anything— / a pack of pigs sucking at the blank canvas / of the sow’s belly—and you’d believe it,’ he says at one point, and given the superb control, the authoritative voice and the sheer power of imagination here, we do.”
—Richard Jackson

Praise for Renovation

"A collection to return to again and again"
- Sherod Santos

"I keep refering to this book as Revelation, not Renovation, and that says it all."
-Jim Daniels

Praise for The Counrty of Lost Sons

In the midst of so many fast-talking contemporary poetry books comes Jeffrey Thomson’s lovely The Country of Lost Sons. Here is a book that chooses tender, meditative music over electric chatter. Here are the poems that tell us poetry can still explore and heal earnestly. More than praise, I want to offer gratitude for such an intimate book. After reading it, you will want to offer gratitude too.

— Terrance A. Hayes

If horror is a given in the world, what place exists for beauty? If children are given in ransom to the gods, what parent can give thanks? The Country of Lost Sons takes Job’s children, and Jephthah’s daughter, and Hector’s son, lost at Troy, and fashions from their stories a cautionary chronicle for our own place and time, where love aspires to the condition of protection, but protection serves merely as prelude to elegy.

—Lynne McMahon

Jeffrey Thomson’s The Country of Lost Sons imagines a land where the aggrieved and the grieving come wounded together, across borders of time and nation, epochs of loss and resurrection. There, they are redeemed, if not in fact then in his poems’ muscular music and flint-edged wisdom. So many things “hiss” in these poems—shoes, doors, paper, even grass—we sense the horror lurking within daily graces. It’s this horror Thomson interrogates and then reinvents in the deadly flight of Philoctetes’s arrow and his own son’s small-fisted punch. Beneath the city’s shattered walls—ours, after all—Thomson raises the “terrible blessing of hope.”

—Kevin Stein

The Country of Lost Sons, Jeffrey Thomson’s brilliant new book, shows the poet to be a man deeply read in western and world literature, a poet who sees the past and present, life and art, as inseparable, and yet this knowledge is never forced, never pretentious—just a vital part of life as we live it day to day. How else can we understand the joys and horrors we live except in the context of everyone’s joys and horrors, the book seems to ask. That knowledge and the passion of its saying tips everything toward joy.

—Andrew Hudgins