Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe
Poetry • Red Hen Press • June 2024 In Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe, Jim Tilley draws on his experience as a poet and mathematician to fix a lens on the current raw state of the country and the world and on interpersonal relationships. At times, his mood is merely contemplative, especially while expressing his fondness for nostalgia and in his testaments to family and friends, but as he delves relentlessly into matters political, ecological, and environmental, that mood turns darker, even ominous, infused occasionally with humor to present a more optimistic outlook. Click here to get your copy. 
Against the Wind
Fiction • Red Hen Press • September 2019 Against the Wind is an elegantly written story of relationships involving six principal characters, the strands of whose lives braid together after a chance reunion among three of them. A successful environmental lawyer must take himself to task when he realizes that everything about his work has betrayed his core beliefs. A high school English teacher asks her former high school love to take up her environmental cause. A transgender adolescent male raised by his grandparents struggles to excel in a world hostile to his kind. A French-Canadian political science professor finds himself left with a choice between his cherished separatist cause and his marriage and family. An accomplished engineer is chronically unable to impress his more accomplished father sufficiently to be named head of the international wind technology company his father founded. The Quebec separatist party's Minister of Natural Resources, a divorcée, finds herself caught between her French-Canadian lover and an unexpected English-Canadian suitor. Click here to get your copy. 
Lessons from Summer Camp
Poetry • Red Hen Press • April 2016 In Lessons from Summer Camp, Jim Tilley takes a fifty-year retrospective look at a ten-year period during his childhood and adolescence to discover what summer camp was really about. In both a wistful and an appreciative look back on the days of our youth, the poems reminisce on the memorable events of those summers, from fire-lighting contests at Council Ring, to races in war canoes during Tribal Games, learning to swim, and writing letters home to the inevitable sadness of departing at the end of the summer, saying goodbyes at the station until next year. The poems evoke memories of experiences we’ve all shared and bring perspective to how Lessons from Summer Camp often become apparent only later in life. Click here to get your copy. 
Cruising at Sixty to Seventy
Poetry • April 2014 • Red Hen Press In three sections—Dear Wife, Dear Self, Dear Friends—the speaker, a physicist and mathematician by education, now retired from a career on Wall Street, reflects on everyday experience, finding grace and drama in life’s smaller moments. As in Tilley’s debut collection, In Confidence, many poems use ideas, problems, and puzzles from physics and mathematics to explore personal relationships, such as “Particle and Wave,” in which a fundamental concept from quantum mechanics becomes a metaphor for the ripples and collisions on the fabric of family life. The book ends with a personal essay, “The Elegant Solution” (originally published as a Ploughshares Solo), about Tilley’s relationship with his father based on the language of mathematics. Click here to get your copy. 
The Elegant Solution
Essay / Short Memoir • February 2013 • Ploughshares “A mathematician,” G. H. Hardy wrote, “like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns." Throughout his childhood, Jim Tilley was encouraged to discover such patterns by way of mathematical puzzles his father posed for him to solve. Never satisfied with ordinary solutions, his father insisted on mathematical elegance. More comfortable in the realm of the mind, he could never bring himself to give Tilley a hug; they'd merely shake hands on parting. Both father and son set standards for intellectual achievement so high it was difficult to ever be satisfied. Now, as his father loses his grip on his mind in old age, Tilley, concerned that he is glimpsing his own future, looks back on the decisions he has made in his life and tries to locate the points at which ambition and drive crossed the line into unhealthy obsession. Available in ebook or audiobook. 
In Confidence
Poetry • February 2011 • Red Hen Press In Confidence is Jim Tilley’s first book of poems, ranging from lyric to narrative in form. About half of the 60 poems are open-form sonnets, most of which fit a broad theme of personal and societal “dislocation.” The collection covers a variety of subjects, from father-son and husband-wife relationships to issues of politics, the economy, and the environment. Stephen Dobyns cautions readers to look beyond the apparent calmness and elegance of the poems to the dangers that lurk beneath the surface. Many of the stories have unhappy endings. Several of the poems are presented in pairs with the same underlying setting or situation but markedly different development, exhibiting a kind of “quantum” picture with both states existing at the same time, not surprising since the poet was formerly a physicist. Billy Collins claims that Jim Tilley wins readers’ confidence by keeping a steady hand on the poem while maintaining a steady gaze at the world. This is a book of poems in which readers will find bits and pieces of their own lives. Click here to get your copy. |