Jeffrey Gustavson


Jeffrey Gustavson was born in Jamestown, New York, and educated at Harvard College, Boston University, and the University of Houston. He lives in New York City. His first book of poems, Nervous Forces, was published by Alef Books, New York, in 1994.


Reviews of Nervous Forces

"Nervous Forces is a feat of virtuosity—a lexical pressure-cooker of playful monologues, lyrical rants and shrewdly drawn portraits. Gustavson's poems are buoyed by an agitated sensibility. They are crafted with a sinewy style that is admirable for its intellectual breadth."


Publishers Weekly

"Beyond its satisfying revels in scorn and its generous revelation of the insides of helplessness, hopelessness, and sorrow, Nervous Forces finds its solace or salvation in the extraordinary human breadth of the English language—and suggests in passing that its pleasures are available to all.

Gustavson sees like a painter and thinks like a twentieth-century American cousin of Swift or Donne: the intelligence behind these quick, dense, often funny, and always complicated poems moves faster than the speed of thought, and a reader (miraculously and with grateful surprise) just follows."


—Elizabeth Macklin



A preview of Jeffrey Gustavson's ecstatic
"Calypso Illogics":

Read "Calypso Illogics"
(real order random).





"Calypso Illogics"
copyright (c) by
Jeffrey Gustavson.
All rights reserved.




by Jeffrey Gustavson


"Calypso Illogics"
copyright (c) by
Jeffrey Gustavson.
All rights reserved.








Read "Calypso Illogics"
(real order random).







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