Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, and is the author of multiple books including the memoir fragile, The Belfast Notebooks, The Complete Poems of Catullus, and the edited collection From the Fishouse.  Alice James Books published Half/Life: New & Selected Poems in October 2019.  He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University.  He is currently professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.

”Jeffrey Thomson's Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory proves only on the surface a kind of reliquary, a boneyard, some collection of memento mori. Spiritual resonance and timelessness in these poems, in other words, emanates only notionally from their namesakes: immaculate fingers and feet, hearts and skulls, even foreskins. It is in the act, however, of imagining the value of these often macabre, sideshow-worthy bits and pieces of our bodies that Thomson finds his redemption. Yes, as Eliot sort of said (and Thomson has ironically echoed), we know more than the dead. And they are what we know.”
—Chad Davidson

“Jeffrey Thomson’s saints and gods and fathers and sons appear with the intensity of aphorism. Exploring the ragged veil between need and faith, these poems remind me of E.M. Cioran’s poor maidservant “who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache,” thereby putting “all theologians to shame.” In one sense, this is an utterly contemporary book, mourning the current Plague and the epic distances between us. In a larger sense, these are poems about conviction in language’s power to interrogate history and connect us, even at this crisis point, to the beloved world.”
—Penelope Pelizzon

"Thomson’s exquisite poems look to the things broken, severed, bronzed, and held aloft. Elegantly, the work guides us through the curios that we have fashioned in our own search for our own meaning. The poems gaze deeply into our human need to imbue the things of this world with power and, further, into the mysteries of how the legacies of the past still hold inspire awe. What Thomson finds these poems are a cache of wonder."
—Oliver de la Paz, author of The Boy in the Labyrinth