Book excerpt: Poetry. Winner of the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. "TOM THOMSON IN PURGATORY falls gracefully into the American tradition of the extended persona poem...Troy Jollimore knows how to trot forth a character as distinct as one who might be encountered in sharply rendered fiction...Of course, we know and delight in the knowledge that Tom Thomson is a verbal phantom, the result of the poet's word-spinning, but at the same time we lean forward to believe in him--our hero for the moment, a man of the hour...Reading this book, you are bound to take both Tom Thomson and his creator to your heart and to savor the miscellany of other poems that make up this superb collection"--Billy Collins.