Published 2019. Paperback, 8 x 8 ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616486. [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Organized around three sequences of numbered tercets, Notebook of Last Things maps a city undergoing dynamic, transformative change along with the sense of living that change—its rhythms and patterns, its peculiar commitments, its urgencies and pleasures as well as its inequalities, tensions, and fateful “unsaids.” Possessed by the drama of the ephemerality of experience, tuned into the drift of the present, Notebook of Last Things draws on the lyric to meditate on the present, and the powers, acknowledged and unacknowledged, that make it up.

“ Notebook of Last Things is written in dialogue with (or in counterpoint to) Walter Banjamin’s Angel of History and his/her/its “unreadable tally of catastrophe.” Thompson has an eagle eye for the rips and fissures destroying our social fabric, for the discrepancies that seem ironic and then reveal themselves as tragic, the “Art Deco walkway over the beltline/[ with a] Chain link fence to discourage jumpers.” In the quality of his attention, he could be a minimalist version of Ron Silliman or a Basho-inflected George Oppen. His steady gaze is well worth following.” —Rae Armantrout

On the author's previous books:

About Landscape with Light :
“a subtle and gorgeous book of cinematic ekphrasis, [it] asks an important question about the nature of visual culture: ‘Do we still worship the old god of beauty or have we created a new one…’ The repurposing of light is clear here, making fluid calibrations of seeing and feeling into luminous phrases[…]In a language at once illustrative and occult, Jon Thompson is questing for a higher light.’—Peter Gizzi

About Strange Country :
"And through and beyond this delineation of casual brutality, of bad politics, of bad art and architecture unfit for human existence, Jon Thompson crucially raises a dancing flag for poetry itself, not least in the poem, 'To Paradise, I Give My Half Forgotten Dreams,' a flagrant manifesto in favour of beauty.” —Kelvin Corcoran

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