The Pitch

by Tom Thompson

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781882295562
Publisher:	Alice James Books
Publication date:	04/01/2006
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Tom Thompson holds degrees from Dartmouth College, the University of Sussex (UK), and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is currently vice president of a book advertising agency in New York. His first book, Live Feed, received a Greenwall Grant from the Academy of American Poets.

Read an Excerpt

“Rough sketch for a shinier forest”

Our plans, OK,
drawn on the very best material.
If it’s not titanium, I’m not interested. Piston
the leaves up higher. Fashion new buildings
from smoke. Brushed, right? That’s what we make of it.
Our needs are plenipotentiary
and forever in debt to the depletor.
A him? Ahem. Wispy god, indelicate
haze we only need some of in this mirrory city.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

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 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Thompson's (Live Feed) style in this second collection is invigorating. His 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. The titles hint at the fun and freedom he finds in language (e.g., "Rough sketch for a shinier forest"), and wordplay and punning pour expertly from his poet's cup (e.g., "A him? Ahem. Wispy god, indelicate/ haze we only need some of in this mirrory city"). His most effective pieces come stamped with his idiosyncratic view of the world, yet sometimes, the mundane slips in and drags them along the concrete: "Destiny is an excuse for existence. And this poem/ is an excuse to pause on my way to work." Luckily, the closing poem is a good one. Although Thompson sometimes gets bogged down in the trite, when he allows both his imagination and language to soar-as in some of the earlier poems, which reveal a city modern in its intricacies and confusions-he writes athletic, almost surreal lines that stimulate and charm. Recommended for most collections.-Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal