Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory

The quirky and macabre second book from Thomson (Half/Life: New and Selected Poems) is rich with breathtaking juxtaposition. In largely one-to-two-page poems, Thomson uses the relics of isolated body parts to capture painful truths, as in "The Foot of Mary Magdalene": "Such division was unsurprising./ Mary, really, she was used/ to it." In "Galileo's Middle Finger" (which finds the astronomer under house arrest, reading), he writes: "His middle finger traces/ the path of the words./ The evening spins/ around him across a sky/ frozen with stars." Thomson often pushes images so far as to bear profundity: "He put desire/ on the end of a spear and offered it// to me handle first" ("The Tale of the Great Martyr Demetrius, the Myrrh-Gusher"). Blending allusions to ancient characters alongside contemporary ones, such as in "Ode to Ella Fitzgerald and the Belvedere Herakles," he bridges a wide gap, allowing the reader to see humanity in both places. These elegant poems are full of surprising and moving revelations. (May)