Poetry/Essays

Poetry & Lyric Essays

Recent Poetry

Companions of His Thoughts More Green: Poems for Andrew Marvell, Edited
by David Wheatley (Broken Sleep Books, 2022): "In a Time of Floods"

Interim 38:2 (2021): "Ode to the Wind not in the Pindaric Mode" and "What We Do and in Doing are Undone By" online
Matter (Issue 29, 2021): "On the Problem of Likeness and Difference"; "A Short History of the Garden"here

The Fortnightly Review(2021): "V" from "Names Made for Us in Another Century": here

Last Kind Words (Shearsman Books, 2021), edited by Peter Riley: "Names Made for Us in Another
Century" [a sequence of eight linked sonnets]

The Carolina Quarterly (Winter 2021): "A Question of How Far Back You Want to Go," "Obligation," "Art of the Gods"
New American Writing 38 (2020): "Election"

Conduit 29 (Spring 2019): "The Inescapability of It"

SplitLevel Journal Issue 2 (Summer 2019): "Solace of the Foreign" and "The Familiar Becomes Extreme":
online here
Poetry Collections

Notebook of Last Things (Shearsman Books, 2019)

"Notebook of Last Things is written in dialogue with (or in counterpoint to) Walter Benjamin's Angel of History and his/her/its 'unreadable tally of catastrophe." Thompson has an eagle eye for the rips and fissures
destroying our social fabric, for the discrepancies that seem ironic and then reveal themselves as tragic, the
'Art Deco walkway over the belt line [with a chain link fence to discourage jumpers.' In the quality of his attention, he could be a minimalist version of Ron Silliman or a Basho-inflected George Open. His steady gaze is worth following.--Rae Armantrout

"In Strange Country Jon Thompson addresses the voices, amongst others, of 'the traffic of fear' and bids their speakers join the living. It is also an invitation to the reader to enter a specifically American poetry of the here-and-now. The accomplishment of Strange Country begins with the exact measure of its line and discovered idiom in the face of what may well be termed the present contradictions of a strange country. What sustains that accomplishment is a poet's attention to a 'wide-open polyphony' equal to the multiple realities of its subject" --Kelvin Corcoran

Landscape with Light (Shearsman Books, 2014)

"Landscape with Light, a subtle and gorgeous book of cinematic ekphrasis, asks an important question about the nature of visual culture:"Do we still worship the old god of beauty, or have we created a new one..." The repurposing of light is clear here, making fluid recalibrations of seeing and feeling into luminous phrases capturing a form of organic thought in motion pictures. In a language at once illustrative and occult, Jon Thompson is questing for a higher light."--Peter Gizzi

Selected Reviews:
http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/declarative-urgent-and-rare-jon-thompsons-landscape-with-light/
http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20mag%202015/feb2015/ShadesOfCool.Baylis.htm
http://tearsinthefence.com/2014/12/20/jon-thompsons-landscape-with-light-shearsman-books/

Brief interview:
http://theimportanceofbeingaloof.tumblr.com/post/111647988434/5-questions-with-jon-thompson

The Book of the Floating World (Parlor Press, 2007)

"If history is the patient work of interpreting those records of the dead that are left to us, Jon Thompson's searching poems are genuinely historical--acts of listening and looking with a complex, and empathetic, attention. These poems, with their grave cadences and moral clarity, in the end counter the blinding white light of disaster that suffuses them"--Susan Stewart

Reviews of The Book of the Floating World
http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue04/html/features/reviews/the_book_of_the_floating_world.htm
http://www.wordforword.info/vol8/Shimoda.htm

Lyrical Essays

After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing
(Shearsman Books, 2009)

"Jon Thompson's passionately unsettling reading of American literary history is both an act of exorcism and an elegy. He has taken to heart the advice of Edmund Jabes: 'only in fragments can we read the immeasurable totality." Beginning with William Bradford's anxiously sacralized account Of Plymouth Plantation in which the word of God makes itself manifest in a wilderness of hieroglyphs, Thompson's essays/trace the violent heritage of our own time and people. He moves through 'the invisible soul' of Melville's Bartleby, Dickinson's ferociously intimate letters, and the deliberately fragmented death sentences of Whitman's Specimen Days to climax in a stunning examination of Micheal Herr's linguistic virtuosity in Dispatches, a text 'that aspires to pure silence.'" --Susan Howe

After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing (2009)
http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2009/thompsonJon.htm
A sample essay from After Paradise can be read at Identity Theory:
http://www.identitytheory.com/nonfiction/thompson_melville.phpweeblylink_new_window

Reviews of After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing
Notre Dame Review, Issue 30:http://www.nd.edu/~ndr/issues/ndr30/contents30.html
Blackbox Manifold, No. 4:http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue4/AdamPiette.html