Wallace Stevens's claim, in his "Adagia," that "all poetry is experimental poetry" serves as a tacit framework for Turpentine Headache. The book brings together the minimalist and maximalist tendencies that have defined Jeffrey Gustavson's years-long exploration of the lyric possibilities inherent in traversals of what he calls "the jungle of language." In effect, the work investigates the preconditions of utterance as a source for poems, seeking to inhabit "grammars of existence" that seem anterior to speech itself, let alone writing. Central to the project is a serendipitous reversal: the possibility that language is not an instrument to be commanded but a force to be surrendered to. His explorations have yielded poems of unexpected refinement, intriguingly eclectic subject-matter, and an almost uncanny naïveté—"ancient and remote," he says, "like baubles some careworn archetype has outgrown and discarded."

Jeffrey Gustavson is the author of Nervous Forces (Alef Books)—which Publishers Weekly called "a feat of virtuosity [and] enormous ingenuity"—and of The Ironic Gaze of Señor Ocelot and six other chapbooks from the Frolic Press. His work has appeared in Agni, Arrowsmith Journal, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, Canto, Epiphany, Fence, The Fiddlehead, Grand Street, The New Yorker, Nine Mile, The Paris Review, The Plum Review, Plume, Poetry, and other journals. In 1997, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, which he used for a residency at the Montana Artists Refuge. He lives in New York City.