Visitor's Guest

"Who is looking at, listening to and leaning on whom? And what is left of looking, listening and leaning in what is ironically referred to as the post ultimate glade? Thompson, with understated assertiveness, doesn't answer these questions, but the poems in The Visitor's Guest changed the way I had to walk around the block this morning. Thompson's writing opens up a space with which I'm half familiar - perhaps it's the sense of honesty which underlies his slanted lyrical stance - but which continues to surprise. Many of these poems engage with 'love', as a perception, as a verb, but to say so underestimates them. Visceral, tangential, with a genuine sense of belief / refusal to believe. You might think that you've arrived but, most of all, how interesting it is trying to get there." -Lucy Burnett

"These poems ask about the nature of avowal and disavowal. Is a poem a love poem because it says so, or by way of an agon of interior discord? Is to merely state something ever equivalent to its understanding? Does the path of the poem take us beyond uncertainty or to its heart?" -Louis Armand

"Nathan Thompson the musician is evident in these sensitively-crafted poems; his sheer emotional intensity, inventiveness, wit and virtuosity are, to me at any rate, reminiscent of Chopin at his most radical. With an urgent sense of wonder, he explores the whole of human experience through the prism of one meaningful relationship in language that is constantly being forced to become fit for purpose." -Catherine Hales