Soldier On

About the Author

Gale Marie Thompson is the author of Soldier On (Tupelo Press, 2015) and Helen or My Hunger (YesYes Books, 2020). She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Her work appears in American Poetry Review, Tin House Online, Gulf Coast, Guernica, BOAAT, and Crazyhorse, among others. She is the founding editor of Jellyfish Magazine, and she lives, writes, and teaches in Grand Rapids, Michigan. You can find her on Twitter at @thegalester.

Advanced Praise

“Soldier On, Gale Marie Thompson’s first full-length collection of poetry, begins with a poem (‘Cilantro Blue’) that includes the line, ‘Anything is harbor. Anything is singing.’ What comes after that is a poetry of loosely gathered language—just stubborn enough to cohere, just disjointed enough to take on the characteristics of a delicate but indelible lace.” — Jenny E. Drai, Rain Taxi

The language in this collection shines with the unexpected—not just the little heartbreaks that happen in the moments of yearning or resignation to the what-might-have-been scenarios in the poems. The imagery itself is exquisite and surprising. In ‘Glass Eye Poem,’ for example, Thompson writes, ‘You knitted the smallest/yarn babies/in a seahorse pouch.’ Encountering these poems is like walking into an antique shop and finding a toy from your childhood or trinkets in a hope chest. The poems just feel like home. They are warm, safe, and familiar but also brim with that unnameable feeling that teeters between sadness and joy. In the opening poem, ‘Cilantro Blue,’ the speaker invites the reader in with, ‘Come be swept up & sieved/& enter & enter & enter.’ How can one walk into this work and not be swept up in the tender shine of Thompson’s words? — American Microreviews & Interviews

Shared history comes from many places. The notion of collective consciousness. The need to be part of family. The desire to create meaning in a life. The desire to have a set of things—call them values, call them rituals—by or with which to live. Soldier On vibrates with shared history; it collects and describes its objects, it elaborates on and reinvents memory for the purpose of self-preservation as well as a wider, societal preservation. It celebrates the process of remembering and forgetting, and of needing to hold on and push forward. It is both deeply personal and vastly interpersonal. It possesses a certain American-ness and also universality. We see gingham and also pulsars, we ‘float up and down,’ ‘flash in and out.’ We are not sure where we exist sometimes, but are also grounded in the sense that we are somehow contained, by recurring details, scenes, and the inclusiveness of Thompson’s language. The I, we, and you, are interchangeable and immutable. We are collected and are collecting. — Dara Cerv, Sink Review

“Soldier On is made out of a pure and haunting love for the world, for its beauty and its mistakes, and it‘s a sound you‘ll never be able to get away from.” — Nate Pritts

“Rumors come ahead of Soldier On—be ready to let your guard down, to find yourself thinking things you haven’t thought before. Be ready to be changed.” — Dara Wier

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-936797-55-4