Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance Press Release – Join the MWPA and Longfellow Books to celebrate the launch of award-winning poet Jeffrey Thomson’s debut memoir Fragile (Red Mountain Press). Thomson’s poetry collection Birdwatching in Wartime won the 2010 Maine Literary Award for Poetry.

When Jeffrey Thomson travels to Costa Rica first at twenty-two, he has no idea he is beginning a journey that will take him years to finish and come close to costing him his life—three times—as he explores the rich landscapes of the tropics, the deserts of the American West, and finally the layered history of the cities of old Europe.

Part globe-trotting adventure story, part meditation on place and beauty, part tragedy, fragile offers an intimate portrait of a man looking for escape but unable to hide from the real threat he unknowingly carries inside his own chest.

“Thomson writes with both a clarity of vision and a profundity of thought that will leave you breathless, humbled, and deeply inspired.” —Kathryn Miles

“Life and death and poetry, love and loss, nature and spirit, joy and risk, delight in small things and large–these are among the pleasures of fragile, a book to read in a gulp, and then to be savored in small bites for years to come. Jeff Thomson is a poet of the mind but also a poet of the heart, both figurative and literal, and here he proves himself a memoirist of the heart and mind as well. Fragile marks new territory for this accomplished poet, new treasure for his readers, new ways to think about our world.” — Bill Roorbach, author of The Remedy for Love

Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, and is the author of multiple books including the memoir Fragile, the poetry collection Birdwatching in Wartime, The Complete Poems of Catullus, and the edited collection From the Fishouse. He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University. He is currently professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.

• Event: BOOK LAUNCH: JEFFREY THOMSON’S “FRAGILE”
• Start: November 5, 2015 7:00 pm
• End: November 5, 2015 8:00 pm
• Category: Readings
• Updated: October 16, 2015
• Venue: Longfellow Books
• Address: Portland