Overview

Titled after a small gallery of the same name found in Rome, the poems are devoted to meditations on religious relics and works of art. They explore the narrative power these objects carry--the way we imbue totemic figures with both meaning and story, and the potential they have to define the world.

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9781948579254

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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 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"

Author Information

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.

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