Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor; and the author of ten books including Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory, Half/Life: New and Selected Poems, The Belfast Notebooks, The Complete Poems of Catullus, and Birdwatching in Wartime. He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Center at Queens University Belfast, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University. He is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.

"Jeffrey Thomson’s new poems are pilgrimages, journeys toward the sacred instants within secular days. Like St. Francis, one of this book’s presiding spirits, Thomson finds kinship with the elements and entities around him, whether they be “[p]asqueflower,/ rattlesnake master, [and] sedge/ flattened into crystal” after an ice storm, or the enormous “night brittle/and brilliant with stars.” Devotion in a long marriage; vigils for aging elders; the sharp, unexpected blessing of afternoon gone numinous with a shift in the clouds as “sunlight/ dives through/ that sudden hole/ it’s been searching for”: in these poems, Thomson captures gorgeous, ephemeral moments where the quotidian achieves the radiance of the holy."
—Penelope Pelizzon, author of A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye

"'The world is like this:' Thomson opens one of these articulate and capacious poems, and this collection, again and again, lives up to that assertion. Here are poems that span the breadth of Western history in order to come back to what matters now, and always. They remind us why we read poetry in the first place."
—Christian Barter, author of The Ends