The Pitch revels in the city's contradictions : interiors and exteriors, beauty and fear, the Buy and the Sell. With keen attention to sound and iridescent, ephemeral imagery touched with whimsy, these spirited poems convey a sense of urgency and warmth—together celebrating the city’s hustle and hucksters, citizens and suspects.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Inspired by that infamous city-dwelling poet Baudelaire, the 48 poems of Thompson's second collection swagger, looking with equal parts wonder and spleen through the streets of New York, where "sway governs" and "There's always something else to see." Jerky, percussive sentences strung in sometimes shapely and sometimes jagged stanzas and blocks of prose convey the sights, sounds and smells of the city in which "the blind, milky liquor of Yankee fog" aids "absence masquerading as engulfment." The city also inspires strung-out escapism. Police become "dolls built to simulate laughter," and, in a fit of abstraction, a crowd is "an armada of embarkations and retreats." Sudden swerves between densely packed images ("Today's purple hedges part their hairs") and shifts in tone from humorous to despairing to empathic give the poems a destabilizing feel, at times obscuring their subjects but more often creating momentum. In the best of these, Thompson (Live Feed, 2001) makes the awful beautiful and the beautiful awful, in the hope that "when/ radiance comes we go/ with it even if it blinds us." (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“Tom Thompson’s poems are galvanized by the surge of electrical language.... their popping and buzzing makes the hair stand at the back of your neck.”—Slope
"[Thompson’s] poems are not bound by the constraints of realism or logic but live in that zone above the trampoline's bounce, a place seemingly-but illusorily-gravity-free...wordplay and punning pour expertly from his poet's cup." —Library Journal "The Pitch is finally an ebullient celebration, itself a place where the "looted images" of Thompson's city and life can rise to amaze us regardless of their original homes."—Colorado Review
"Before the sum of the parts of the city can equal the limits of location (here defined by concrete, water towers and rooftops), Tom Thompson's poems pull the speaker back out of the crowd. The Pitch is located in the moments where atmosphere ends and subjectivity begins. Here the 'not quite' occupies space and all notions of urban are disallowed from overtaking the landscape. This collection is an astonishing experience that turns a room into an everywhere. The book is exquisite and luxurious and mysterious."—Claudia Rankine
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