Turpentine Headache Book

Wallace Stevens's claim, in his "Adagia," that "all poetry is experimental poetry" serves as a tacit framework for Turpentine Headache. The book brings together the minimalist and maximalist tendencies that have defined Jeffrey Gustavson's years-long exploration of the lyric possibilities inherent in traversals of what he calls "the jungle of language." In effect, the work investigates the preconditions of utterance as a source for poems, seeking to inhabit "grammars of existence" that seem anterior to speech itself, let alone writing. Central to the project is a serendipitous reversal: the possibility that language is not an instrument to be commanded but a force to be surrendered to. His explorations have yielded poems of unexpected refinement, intriguingly eclectic subject-matter, and an almost uncanny naïveté—"ancient and remote," he says, "like baubles some careworn archetype has outgrown and discarded."