Troy Jollimore

Troy Jollimore Poems

Troy Jollimore Biography

Troy Jollimore is a poet, philosopher, and literary critic. Troy Jollimore was born in Liverpool, Nova Scotia and attended the University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University in 1999, under the direction of Harry Frankfurt and Gilbert Harman. He has lived in the U.S. since 1993 and is currently Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Chico. He has been an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center (2006–07), the Stanley P. Young Fellow in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (2012), and a Guggenheim Fellow (2013). Jollimore's philosophical writings frequently concern ethical issues connected to personal relationships. His first book, Friendship and Agent-Relative Morality, was published in 2001; his second, Love's Vision, appeared in 2011, and his third, On Loyalty, in 2012. He has also published on topics including the ethics of terrorism, the depiction of evil in literature, the nature of happiness, and so-called "admirable immorality." His first collection of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry in 2006. It was also nominated for the 2007 Poets' Prize, and individual poems in the collection received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. His second collection, At Lake Scugog, appeared in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in 2011. Jollimore's poems have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The Believer, McSweeney's, and Poetry. He is also a frequent book reviewer, writing for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, and the Boston Review, among others.)

The Best Poem Of Troy Jollimore

On the Origins of Things

Everyone knows that the moon started out
as a renegade fragment of the sun, a solar
flare that fled that hellish furnace
and congealed into a flat frozen pond suspended
between the planets. But did you know
that anger began as music, played
too often and too loudly by drunken performers
at weddings and garden parties? Or that turtles
evolved from knuckles, ice from tears, and darkness
from misunderstanding? As for the dominant
thesis regarding the origin of love, I
abstain from comment, nor will I allow
myself to address the idea that dance
began as a kiss, that happiness was
an accidental import from Spain, that the ancient
game of jump-the-fire gave rise
to politics. But I will confess
that I began as an astronomer—a liking
for bright flashes, vast distances, unreachable things,
a hand stretched always toward the furthest limit—
and that my longing for you has not taken me
very far from that original desire
to inscribe a comet's orbit around the walls
of our city, to gently stroke the surface of the stars.

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