Pure Products of America, Poems by Christian Thompson

Christian Thompson seeks to explore how one becomes one of America's crazy pure products by choosing significant personal moments, as well as the actual and imaginary experiences of others, that occurred in the context of historical events and places of broad interest and consequence. Inspired in part by William Carlos Williams' poem, "To Elsie," Marx's "Das Kapital," and Kenneth Burke's seminal essay, "The Rhetoric of Hitler's 'Battle," this book's intricate structure embodies deep knowledge, both personal and historical.

Sample Poems by Christian Thompson

"Christian Thompson has written a luminous book-length poem that reads almost like a novel but is written as an extended lyric poem. Pure Products of America is a brilliant evocation of our country as it was, and is."--Thomas Lux

"Be advised: within Pure Products of America, you will find an accurate and wondrously layered 'history.' What unfolds, poem by carefully sequenced poem, are the manifold 'stories' which lie between event and experience, mind and heart. In that gap, where war is real and Wilma Flintstone is on TV and someone's brother is dying, we are asked to face the fact that facts are not the only story. This book, like Christian Thompson's previous, Low Growth, is dedicated to craft, music, research--but it also plays longingly and intuitively as light filtering through shade."--Kate Knapp Johnson

"Christian Thompson's Pure Products of America displays a rare audacity, a book-length poem speaking truthfully about what it means to be alive in America. It showcases Thompson at his very best: a modern poet navigating the pitfalls of consciousness and personal history, without sentimentality or hyperbole, leaving readers at the end with an urgent sense of our times." --Chris Banks

ISBN: 978-1625491381, 140 pages

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