Books

A Piece of Good News

Poet Katie Peterson’s fourth collection is filled with movement – movement through landscapes, emotions, and states of being – that courses with uncommon, illusory lyricism.

– Southern Living

An essential book for our brutal age.

– Rosanna Warren

This One Tree

“No one is going to not-know what these poems intend, what they state, and why they exist. They have the rigor of Oppen and a serious eye-level attention to pieces and parts of the chosen subject that give them an analogical edge over pure description. They bring heart and soul back to the poet writing them.”

– Fanny Howe

Permission

“Peterson is a poet whose generosity lies in giving the reader something to do — to register the successive jolts and calms of comprehension.”

– Ron Slate

The Accounts

In her astonishing third book, The Accounts, Katie Peterson explores with tremendous lyric precision and emotional power not merely the heartbreak of personal tragedy but also the desire to make a beleaguered world new against the pressure of loss. Ovid’s spirit of metamorphosis haunts these poems and asks us to reconsider the redemptive power implicit in an account, how it is made, given, and made again. To fashion an account is to reckon, to reconcile, to recall, to count and so to number, to make things matter. As Peterson says in her opening poem entitled “Spring:”

Everything, everything, and before everything the possibility of something else,

the moment when a moral gets minced by an account a body makes of any other body, and time takes place instead of taking time.

So too, in the title poem, time is less mastered than engaged, less stilled than quickened by birdsong and its longing, its will, its imaginative grace. Here a nest cradles a purpose so full of adoration, it lures us to the future in the past, the past in the future, the heaven in the earth below.

- Rilke Prize Citation, 2014