A Piece of Good News
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A rich and challenging new collection from the young award-winning poet
In those days I began to see light under every
bushel basket, light nearly splitting
the sides of the bushel basket. Light came
through the rafters of the dairy where the grackles
congregated like well-taxed citizens
untransfigured even by hope. Understand I was the one
underneath the basket. I was certain I had nothing to say.
When I grew restless in the interior,
the exterior gave.
Dense, rich, and challenging, Katie Peterson’s A Piece of Good News explores interior and exterior landscapes, exposure, and shelter. Imbued with a hallucinatory poetic logic where desire, anger, and sorrow supplant intelligence and reason, these poems are powerful meditations of mourning, love, doubt, political citizenship, and happiness. Learned, wise, and witty, Peterson explodes the possibilities of the poetic voice in this remarkable and deeply felt collection.
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In the fourth collection from Peterson (The Accounts), a typical poem moves by visceral detail rather than by association or logic, with many spectacular arrivals that overwhelm the journey: "there should be a word/ for when events are natural/ but their order makes no sense." A poem called "The Sentence" is indeed one sentence that climbs gorgeously to the top of a mountain, exposing glacier, lake, and wildflower, to snag on an aspen carved by a couple "who loved themselves so much they stayed right/ there with their knives until they finished their names." Elsewhere, light leaking through a barn roof becomes a metaphor for how knowledge enters as brilliant fragments, "nearly splitting/ the sides of the bushel basket." These poems burst into consciousness: a child meets John Lennon through her mother's tears at his death, knives and scissors are the implements of love. The heart of the collection is "The Massachusetts Book of the Dead," a sequence of haiku-like poems that navigate the aftermath of a mother's death: "Her shopping list, years after she was gone./ The pleasure of organizing need." "Self Help," which begins, "The eye is the lamp of the body, so I tried/ to make a world when all I ate was light," gets bogged down in a forced digestive conceit. But "The Economy" makes elegant work of the same theme: gifts that must be spent.
