On Jupiter Place: New Poems

by Nicholas Christopher

Best known as a novelist, Nicholas Christopher began publishing poems in The New Yorker in his twenties, and has published eight collections, praised over the years by poets and critics as being among America’s most important poets. Reviewing his selected poems, Crossing the Equator , published eight years ago, The Washington Post said, “To read his richly honed and sensuous work, which has so much tensile strength, is to visit other worlds and then to return to our own disturbed by time, but also refreshed and reawakened.”

On Jupiter Place is his first book since that collection, and it contains material that is perhaps his most personal, autobiographical and intimate work yet. Beautifully made and carefully constructed, one might be reminded of Keats thinking that his poems were “little machines” of feeling. And everywhere in this book are moments of disorientation, where the wonder of the poem transcends understanding and leads its readers back into themselves slightly startled and richer for the effort. As Merwin has written, “his poems are vibrant with light and the surprise of recognition. He shows us again and again the luminous nature of the familiar.”

The Washington Post , reviewing his Crossing the New & Selected Poems , reported that "Nicholas Christopher is a fabulist...His fiction often puts me in mind of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, two time-travelers who are his great precursors. His poetry tends to build on the work of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill. Like them, he has a taste for the exotic, the faraway, the displaced, the imaginary.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2016

About the author

Nicholas Christopher was born and raised in New York City. He was educated at Harvard College, where he studied with Robert Lowell and Anthony Hecht. Afterward, he traveled and lived in Europe. He became a regular contributor to the New Yorker in his early twenties, and began publishing his work in other leading magazines, both in the United States and abroad, including Esquire, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, the Nation, and the Paris Review. He has appeared in numerous anthologies, including the Norton Anthology of Poetry, the Paris Review 50th Anniversary Anthology, the Best American Poetry, Poet's Choice, the Everyman's Library Poems of New York and Conversation Pieces, the Norton Anthology of Love, the Faber Book of Movie Verse, and the Grand Street Reader. He has edited two major anthologies himself, Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets (Anchor, 1989) and Walk on the Wild Side: Urban American Poetry Since 1975 (Scribner, 1994) and has translated Martial and Catullus and several modern Greek poets, including George Seferis and Yannis Ritsos. His books have been translated and published many other countries, and he is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships from various institutions, including the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at Yale, Barnard College, and New York University, and is now a Professor on the permanent faculty of the Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. He lives in New York City with his wife, Constance Christopher, and continues to travel widely, most frequently to Venice, the Hawaiian island of Kauai, and the Grenadines.

Reviews

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

“just as strangers attempt from passing
impressions to imagine us whole
placing us outside of time:
as immortal as we’ll ever get”

I already know his poems will stick with me for a long time & I’ll come back to them every now and then to find a new or different truth. ✨🤍 epic, personal, magical. One of my favorite writers.

[Tom Malinowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's been much too long since I've read poetry much less a collection in a book. I will rave until the ends of the earth about Nicholas Christopher as he is an underestimated author. I've read six of his books and they are all magical, seductive, and heart breaking. His poems are in the same vein. From working the graveyard shift to carrying your own tombstone, then to ruined temples and the self destruction of Lois Lane, these short tales will widen your eyes and give you pause to ponder.

5/15 Reread a second time. Still hypnotically beautiful.

[Jennifer Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's something about Christopher's writing. Even beyond the beautiful language, and snippets of magic, he has a way of bringing small poems to life in a way that allows for full scenes to build, and reading a collection is an experience not unlike what reading a collection of short stories would be in terms of content, though the poems are short and the collection is relatively short--his language is that full, that vibrant, that worth exploring and re-reading.

In this particular collection, there are sequences that are especially full, but there's not a poem here that I wouldn't re-read and share, over and over again.

Absolutely recommended.

[Larry Olson · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite poets and this new work is wonderful.