In "The Analystical Language of John Wilkins," Jorge Luis Borges describes a mythical Chinese encyclopedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, that divides all plants and animals into fourteen wonderful, fanciful categories as a means to refute the precise and scientific linguistic structure of those, like Wilkins, who had long sought to produce a universal language.  In his new chapbook, Jeffrey Thomson uses the categories of the Celestial Emporium to create a poem sequence that brings Borges's encyclopedia to life, exploring the way metaphor, memory, and desire combine to rewrite and alter the human experience. 

Update, 9/17/07 - Jeffrey Thomson has been chosen from more than 70 Maine writers from all genres, as the Maine Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellow for 2008.  His selection was based on his chapbook Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.
       

What they're saying about Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge

“The words churn in Jeffrey Thomson’s imaginative poems. The impulse to catalog, to embrace through language, is given free reign in a book that gives life to the fascinating categories of knowledge that come to us from Borges’s ‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.’ The sheer appetite of these poems, their intellectual drive and rhythmic insistence, conveys an almost physical sense of the poet’s curiosity, a wonder that deepens, over the course of the book, to a conveyance of his love for the fullness of the natural world.”
—Bob Hicok

“That Jeffrey Thomson’s fabulous and fabulist Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge creates an enchanting world within our own world puts him in the company of Calvino, Borges and Cervantes, but that he also inserts our own world into the fabulous one makes this collection an amazing feat. He has it, that is, both ways. Working from Borges’s idea of an imaginary taxonomy of all plants and animals, each poem introduces us to a new creature that is also a mirror of ourselves. Indeed, the poems are filled with such radical leaps so that we start to ask with him—‘How to count?’ but of course we can’t, for the poems suggest an endless cascade of surprising turns. ‘I could write anything— / a pack of pigs sucking at the blank canvas / of the sow’s belly—and you’d believe it,’ he says at one point, and given the superb control, the authoritative voice and the sheer power of imagination here, we do.”
—Richard Jackson

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Guenette says, “If there's a consistent theme in Hush, I would say it's the very poetic tradition of a narrator wringing order from the chaos of desire and loss. My goal with these poems was to generate velocity and construct a voice that is both distracted and amazed by a world of strange, beautiful details that hint at a higher order. I also wanted to create a voice that finds humor in this world, as way of negotiating defeat.”