Live Feed
Tom Thompson
Live Feed examines how we live our lives on-screen. We are conscious of our performance in ways that people in Shakespeare’s time could not have been, before “reality TV,” web cams, and nightly tabloid news blurred beyond recall distinctions between the real and the imaginary or performed—before anyone could become an instant, world-wide celebrity—anyone’s life instantly fodder for television or movies at the media’s whim, chewed up and spit out, our lives bought by commercials meant to sell us something. In these poems the commerce machine often assumes the persona of “the city,” a place where the speaker seeks an accomodation between urbanicity and organicity, attempting to make some sort of whole of our fractured society, sensibilities and lives. Fracture is everywhere evident in Live Feed, most obviously in the form of many of the poems, which are literally fractured down the center, yet made whole by their insistent lyricism and beauty.
"…the poems in Live Feed hold together because of their sophisticated ligature and nervous system: flash-in-the-pan assonance and alliterative puns, onomatopoeia, staggered internal rhymes. Thom Thompson’s poems are galvanized by the surge of electrical language, and, more often than not, their popping and buzzing makes the hair stand at the back of your neck."
—Slope
"Live Feed crackles and hums with newness. It is as
fresh a re-imagining of the possibility of what language can be to the
cityscape as Hart Crane's was to the Brooklyn Bridge. It's "break-neck," "nervy static," "non-sequential sequins." It's voyeurism, gunmetal, brick and pigeons. With its cracks and fissures visible, Live Feed is the brash and beautiful portrait of today's urban family."
—D. A. Powell
"In Live Feed, Tom Thompson leads the pastoral deeply into a wild darkness of the here and now. Even more wonderfully, he leads it all the way to new light and hearty wakefulness. The project of American poetry is freshly companioned by these poems."
—Donald Revell
"Tom Thompson's poems are startling in their use of economy. They move
quickly to the heart of matters the mind can indicate but only the spirit
seize. In their various voices, anxious verbal gesturings, swift turns—in
their understanding of the action of spirit as it swerves and gives body
to a poem—they are enormously mature. In fact, a sense of readiness,
great poise, and tightly-wound-up power govern this book from start to
finish. It is original, as well as distinctly of its time.The voice is
haunting, its probing necesssary, its arrivals sturdy, passionate and
true."
—Jorie Graham
about the author
Born
in New Jersey, Tom Thompson has degrees from Dartmouth College, the University
of Sussex (UK), and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His poems
and reviews appear in journals including American Letters & Commentary,
Antioch Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence,
Indiana Review, Pleaides, and others. He has taught literature at
Dartmouth College and the University of Iowa and creative writing through
the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation in New Jersey high schools. Co-founder
of the Alberta duPont Bonsal Foundation for emerging women poets and visual
artists, he is currently vice president of an advertising agency in New
York City, where he lives with his wife, the poet Miranda Field, and their
sons William and Finnian.
Author photo by Miranda Field
