"This sophomore effort mostly continues in the first book's nervous, witty, self-conscious, and at time self-despising modes... Pantoun, epigram, terza rima, puns, and invented forms with new rhyming requirements make much of the volume a pleasure in terms of technique... Altogether different and hard to forget are poems on which Jollimore concludes: stern, vulnerable, lyrical reactions to environmental peril."
Publishers Weekly ... Read more"In this second outing by 2006's National Book Critics Circle Award winner (for Tom Thomson in Purgatory), the poet considers age-old but vexing philosophical dualities: appearance vs. reality, mind vs. body, belief vs. knowledge. Given his day job as a philosophy professor, these aren't surprising subjects; what surprises is the deftness with which he handles them, conjuring great American songbook lyricists ('Don't be misled:/ that sea-song you hear/ when the shell's at your ear?/ It's all in your head') more readily than Descartes or Heidegger... Seriously playful ('no screw-up goes unscrew-/ tinized') or playfully serious ('no man's an iPod'), Jollimore adds buoyancy to weighty human dilemmas without trivializing or distancing them. An engaging collection."
Library Journal (starred review) "Troy Jollimore, a philosophy prof at Chico State, won a National Book Critics Circle prize with his first poetry collection; his second, At Lake Scugog, is easily that good. In lush language draped over familiar forms, Jollimore explores the nature of the self, but don't let that frighten you off. He's got a great sense of humor and an equal fondness for a pun and a laugh, as in Tom Thomson in Tune": "no man's an iPod." Take that, John Donne!"
Kel Munger, Sacramento News & Review "Fans of Tom Thompson in Purgatory as well as new readers will delight in a fresh batch of Tom Thompson sonnets, as well as a trove of new work whose ingenious play with form and notions of selfhood is not to be missed... It can't be overstated
he isn't overrated."
Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, ForeWord Reviews "[W]hat makes the book exceptional is the way it embodies a style of language and thought only a philosopher could deploy so effortlessly."
John Koethe, Philosophers' Magazine Show Less