Poetry Collections:
Birdwatching in Wartime
Renovation
Country of Lost Sons
Anthologies:
From the Fishouse
Limited Editions
Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge
In "The Analystical Language of John Wilkins," Jorge Luis Borges describes a mythical Chinese encyclopedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, that divides all plants and animals into fourteen wonderful, fanciful categories as a means to refute the precise and scientific linguistic structure of those, like Wilkins, who had long sought to produce a universal language. In his new chapbook, Jeffrey Thomson uses the categories of the Celestial Emporium to create a poem sequence that brings Borges's encyclopedia to life, exploring the way metaphor, memory, and desire combine to rewrite and alter the human experience.
Praise for Celestial Emporium
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
Blind Desire
Dionysus Press, 2006
Blind Desire is part of a trilogy of books published for the left-perimeter of the exhibit Messages and Communications at the Mattress factory Museum in Pittsburgh. Jeff Thomson sidtracted the politics and made a direct path to the sensuous. With touch being so much part of personal passions Blind Desire is bilingually printed in English and Braille.
The Halo Brace
Birch Brook Press, 1998 (scroll down)
A cycle of poems on the lingering vibrations of love's effects on life after love, of sorrow and regret, of the "lush spice" of sex. A hand made book with original, woodblock print cover.
"Mellow celebrations of heterosensual appreciation and of cunning linguistics..." Mandrake Review
"Beautifully written!..." ECLECTIC BOOKS.