FARMINGTON —Jeffrey Thomson, award-winning poet, author and UMF professor of creative writing, is celebrating the launch of his new memoir, “fragile” (Red Mountain Press, 2015) with an author’s reading and reception at 7 p.m., Friday, Dec. 4, in the Performance Space in the UMF Emery Community Arts Center.

The event is free and open to the public. It will be followed by a signing by the author with books for sale by Devaney, Doak and Garrett.

When Thomson first traveled to Costa Rica at 22, he had no idea he was beginning a journey that would 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.

A book of stories, a meditation on place and poetry, and a tribute to the ever-receding beauty of the world that is occasionally caught in the loose netting of language, “fragile” offers an intimate portrait of a man looking for escape but unable to hide from the threat he unknowingly carries inside his own chest.

Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, editor, and the author of multiple books including the poetry collection “Birdwatching in Wartime,” “The Complete Poems of Catullus: an Annotated Translation,” and “From the Fishouse.” He has been an NEA Fellow; the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland; and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University. He is currently professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.

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