Distributed for Oberlin College Press
The Pleasure Principle
Jon Loomis’s new collection of poems visits big subjects by way of the commonplace. While The Pleasure Principle is full of surprises, both narrative and metaphoric, it is more than anything a humane and thoughtful exploration of the human condition: passion, mortality, cross-dressing, time, tourism, art, the shifty nature of reality, and, always considered in Loomis’s work, the unknowable absolute.
Table of Contents
Romance: A Parable • The Pleasure Principle • Sin • You Blow Out the Candles • Longing • Epithalamial • Addictions • Happiness • Conversion • Balthus Returns • Russian Novel • Millennial • Skinnydipping, Late Summer • After the Rapture • On the First Tee with Charles Wright • Uncle Chester’s Second Wife • Tourists • Prayer at Thirty Below • Race Point Vanitas • Tall Ships • In the Old City • Dark City • Desiccated Mouse Found on Screen Porch • Insomnia Dentata • Ovid in Florida • Fire Ants • Nursing Home • 1882: The Afterlife • In Circe’s Garden • Letter from the Cardiac Unit • The Past • Uncle • Pneumonia, 1969 • Camping Trip • This Poet’s Life: A Memoir • Interiors • Regret • Damage • Peace • Mis en Abime • In the Mirror It Is Sunday • Misfit Farm • November • Sex • Ars Poetica • Deer Hit • Notes • Acknowledgments