Notebook of Last Things - Softcover

Reseña del editor

Organized around three sequences of numbered tercets, Notebook of Last Things maps a city undergoing dynamic, transformative change along with the sense of living that change—its rhythms and patterns, its peculiar commitments, its urgencies and pleasures as well as its inequalities, tensions, and fateful “unsaids.” Possessed by the drama of the ephemerality of experience, tuned into the drift of the present, Notebook of Last Things draws on the lyric to meditate on the present, and the powers, acknowledged and unacknowledged, that make it up.

“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 beltline/[ 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 Oppen. His steady gaze is well worth following.” —Rae Armantrout

Biografía del autor

Born in Columbus, Ohio, Jon Thompson was educated at University College, Dublin where he received a B.A. in English Language and Literature and an M.A. in English and American Literature (with a thesis on Robert Creeley). He did a Ph.D. at LSU, and has taught at North Carolina State University ever since where he is now a Professor in the English Department. His poetry has appeared in many journals including The American Literary Review, Blackbox Manifold, Colorado Review, The Common, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Iowa Review, New Ohio Review, Shearsman magazine and The White Review. His first collection of poems was The Book of the Floating World (Parlor Press, 2007). His next book, published by Shearsman Books in 2009, was a collection of lyrical essays, After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing. He also provided an Introduction for D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature, in the Shearsman Classics series, which appeared in 2011. Shearsman published his second collection of poems, Landscape with Light.in 2014, his third, Strange Country in 2016, and a further volume, Notebook of Last Things in 2019. Thompson also edits the international online journal, Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics and Free Verse Editions, which now has over 30 titles on its list. See Jon Thompson's website here.