The Big Game Is Every Night
Locofo Chaps | Moria Books
38 pages; saddle-stitch chapbook
Published February 2017
To read for free online visit:http://www.moriapoetry.com/petersonechap.pdf
To order a paper copy visit: http://www.moriapoetry.com/locofo.html
Anonymous Bouquet
Spuyten Duyvil Press
102 pages; trade paperback
Published Sept. 2015
Anonymous Bouquet is intimately, intensely in conversation with writers and ghosts, the self, living and writing, love, dreaming and landscape, lightness. I began reading with this kind of world forming at the edges of the book and then I was completely in the world. Here, the Civil War is talking to the soul, Vermont is talking to a color. I feel so grateful for this, exhilarated by what poetry can do, by what Andy Peterson does as a poet. I want to say it is like assemblage, but it’s so much deeper than that: a kind of cinema of relation. -- Amina Cain
Andrew K. Peterson has given us a strange, startling book of poems. Images that read as elisions revealed via untraditional curves of syntax. Plush and fragile, elusive lines quiver Debbie Harry-like with subtext – with something very wise, regretful, suggestive. A sonnet revises itself in an effort to return. Time withdraws, washes away, wants what it can’t have. What we demand of words. Poems that open the terrestrial to the sky. Then a door closes somewhere in the poem but you get the sense you just caught sight of something unsettling behind it. -- Ella Longpre
To order, please visit: http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/anonymous-bouquet.html
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some deer left the yard moving day
BlazeVox Books
100 pages, trade paperback
Published March 2013
Some have said:
To: “quincify.” To: “decolonize.” Andy's Peterson's some deer is dedicated to “Naropa,” the university he attended for two years. There, he drew rancid, ebullient comics and amazed us all – his “blood company” – with stand-up, improvised accounts and physical examples of a contemporary hybrid poetics. As Oscar Wilde said, “There is no such thing as spontaneity.” I always understood this to mean that the person who improvises the best [Andy Peterson] is also the person who has enough time inside them that, when prompted, it [time] can come out. By “time,” I mean that unique combination of dream-soaked inner life and scholarship that – in Peterson's work – is the capacity to move between a “lit dusk,” “its rituals,” and the “cheerful madness” that a life in community brings. The experiment is to stay alive. In the words of the author himself via Creeley [quoted] [voltage]: “Poets don’t invent the world (they live it).” They: “Forget to ask but remember to release via kisses.” And so on. I can't decide. Is this book a “waterfall” or is it a “volcano”? Or is it, as the Buddhist saying goes: “Both-both.” Both things at once. – Bhanu Kapil
some deer left the yard moving day is a book of many different kinds of love. It is an engendering room wherein we can ask (and are asked) what it means to be human (“stripped bare, griev[ing] for the weakened white cells”). The thing that I find especially miraculous is that this book lives on in the body like herbs do after intake. I ate some stolen, large-leafed basil today and even when I am not looking directly at it anymore, even when I am not pondering it, it continues nourishing from within. This book feels very much like Naropa to me: the incense wafts forging their way up the figures sitting zazen, the chipping bricks and ivy, the turning of envy into compassionate states. – jj hastain
Once in a while, some poems come along that exude American enthusiasm and disaster: “oi hawk-swirl, / oi pale blue / beast devour.” In these poems, Peterson rides onward, outward into horizon and hope and wreckage. Moving Day is made up of structurally juxtaposing serial movements that simultaneously project and deconstruct a poetics of American hospitality, possibility and variation. Conceptualism and sincerity, joy and grief, superimpositions of frames of architectures of sound of collage of derivation radiate imagination over repression. Some Deer is a practice of transforming calamity into a path, echoing, going, fathoming geography of unyielding historical relationship. Read these poems and make marvelous the new-old, “sunflower / your power animal.” Be complicit and harbor intricate lyric conspiracy. Follow these symbolic deer into freedom, risk, danger and dream. Watch the bright heart sparks rise. And together, with Peterson, break out into an OUT THERE, becoming, here, a place, when, now, we’re leaving again, to get to, now, here, again. – Jared Hayes
Available at: blazevox.org (link to book page), and Small Press Distribution.
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karaoke lipsync opera
White Sky Books West Hartford CT / Puhos Finland
205 pages; e-book
Published 2012
j/j hastain has this generousness to say:
Peterson’s “atonal rain” pounds gently and hard over the “lily of the rocks” where “a wise woman averts her eyes”—Karaoke Lipsync Opera, although certainly a cultural document (in that it is composed of varying points on a map, passages within thoroughfares) definitely makes the feeling in us while we are going through it, that we are somehow inhabiting deliberate, a-cultural space. This is one of the wonders of all of Peterson’s writings, but I feel it particularly here, in the way that KLO moves from form to form, interior to exterior, then beyond those. A wrought spectrum indeed.
A barrage--like a bible mysteriously having been brought back to its glyph state, its insinuation state—KLO is a place of lists. Images--images in positions of strain. Chunks of writing in varying forms, line breaks, paragraph structures, syntax (and not), dashes, usual narrative structures, alternating lines between dyad pairs of poets (eg: Joseph Cooper and Maureen Owen). It is all here in this exciting book!
If I pointed individually to each of the gleaming gems in this work, I would spend my entire life (and another and another) with my appendages aching from extending to the points. Come here, into the land of e-book territory, where thought, movement, impression and image can converge in ways that only add to the lives and imaginations of trees (without taking anything from them (by way of paper)).
Oh my, this work! Peterson’s “fat gesture”--a gesture that goes, that takes us far (its “I center
subsiding”).
To read or download for FREE, click here or visit: http://whiteskybooks.blogspot.com/
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bonjour meriwether and the rabid maps
runner-up in Fact-Simile Press' 2010 Equinox Chapbook Contest.
Poet-critic-friend Andrew Wessels writes:
"For Andrew K. Peterson, place refers to two things: geographical location and the observation of one's surroundings. This longer serialized poem alternates between specific coordinate locations: "42°N 07' 44.24" / 70°W 45' 9.13"" and sensual interactions with surroundings: "Concealed timber of these rivers, these beds." Though the coordinates are hyperspecific, they work to dis-locate the reader who likely is unable to, without seeking outside help, connect the coordinates to a known location. We keep asking Where are we? as each set of coordinates arises. The descriptions likewise prevent us from being grounded in a specific understanding that we are in a specific named place. Peterson reminds us that we can only know exactly where we are if we stay in the same place and never move. He chooses, instead, to journey forth, echoing René Char: 'How can we live without the unknown in front of us?'"
To purchase, visit Fact-Simile Press. (Sorry, this book is SOLD OUT)
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Museum of Thrown Objects
BlazeVox Books
Published 2010
What some people said:
Andy Peterson's poetry combines visual art, both his own and some found elsewhere in the universe, with words redolent of mystery, thrillers, clues and riddles, and does so in a far more intelligent and sustaining way than present popular literature -- while not adopting any sense of "superiority" to same. Museum of Thrown Objects is a terrific "read" and a likewise "look" as well. -- Anselm Hollo, Guy Fawkes Day 2009
Imagine an ocean leaving its bed to hover above itself, where it should not be, to form a "silhouette" visible against an "afternoon." The technology of displacement is deployed, in Andrew Peterson's brilliant book, to create: not "delay" but "fusion." It makes sense, then, to build a museum out of artifacts that would, in the wetness beyond architecture, disappear by "low tide", but are instead "kept." Locked away in a decaying archive, "the thrown objects" form perverse alliances when the lights dim. Where the genitalia should be, for example, are "leafs and bugs." Intra-species, foaming, future-soaked, and with a "metallic corsage" delicately sewn to the wrist, the figures in Peterson's poems come to get you. And they do. They get you and take you somewhere until: "we are all here together in our new place." -- Bhanu Kapil
Museum of Thrown Objects exists as a poetic architectural phenomenon. Peterson constructs a kaleidoscopic wunderkammer of lyric, vispo, and conceptual experiments. Reading/Performing through its various wings I am activated into an environment of idiosyncratic relations. Things/Objects/Words have a collaged and artificial sensibility; as if Peterson is laughing at the overbearing seriousness of our contemporary museums with some incredulous anarchistic cut & paste. The difference between encasing an artwork behind glass as a stale and defined representation of some imagined mastery and staging things/objects/words in a dynamic and active performance of potentiality. This museum is enacting a perception embedded in things as much as in ourselves and, to me most importantly, things and selves in relationship to each other. Peterson, and the reader emerge throughout as poet-collectors (curators) in the process of mapping and performing transformation and relationship. Museum of Thrown Objects instructs the reader/performer: "Do not deny you are the work of art.". And so doing provides as it performs a dialogic and critical ethics of reading. We experience Peterson experiencing and thus find our own museums everywhere. -- Jared Hayes
Travis Macdonald's goodreads review: "Andrew K. Peterson's Museum of Thrown Objects is a painstakingly crafted poetic curation of eloquent knick-knacks, electric birdsongs and syntactical calisthenics frozen in time, re-contextualized according to the whims of a brilliantly obsessed librarian. Each of these exhibits being equally imbued with the strange and sometimes grotesque beauty that characterizes the unique and fantastic verse of this eminently talented voice just now emerging, it should come as no surprise: You will find your mind wandering the aisles of this collection long after the book has left your hands."
Scott Abels' goodreads review: "Three different handbooks of Joy! What’s not to like? This is a collage curated by the spirit of Ted Berrigan, with the alien charm of Jack Spicer leaking from the heart. Peterson’s collection of objects is an experiment in salvaging our century with John Wieners. Among the imagination, iambic pentameter is a series of industrial cuts of meat. Something was broken, so Peterson the surgeon making a monster necessarily introduces the idea of vegetables to language. Then: some healing. Then: some unity."
Available at Blazevox, and Small Press Distribution.
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Between Here and the Telescopes
Poetry Collaborations with Elizabeth Guthrie
Slumgullion Press
Published Summer 2008
Awesomeness:
"As happy proof of the truth of no boundaried person, the two find speech between and string it with bright word-shapes and their fellows. This book of poems is happy to have been made in that garden where "half my voice/is yours, all of it here" and "sings there here, hear." These are almost invisible collaborations, and a wonderful contribution to the growing literature of that way of making." - Reed Bye
"With "Between Here and the Telescopes" Elizabeth Guthrie and Andrew Peterson have generated work that is as unpredictable as it is inevitable. One is drawn in by its unfailing focus, then held by the certainty of the language." - Junior Burke
"Somewhere some poets are having a dialogue and in doing that they skip across borders of authorship, narrativity, and what I imagine to be imaginary constraints, to unveil the mind as a collection of possibilities. It's happening here, where "Between Here and the Telescopes" restages collaboration. In these gorgeous poems, (Peterson and Guthrie) play with experimentation, voice, location and dislocation, cut-ups, abstractions, the quotidian and the familiar, to gather, gorgeously and unselfconsciously, a poetics of possibility. That is what is happening now. Glad I'm here in this new century to receive it. - Akilah Oliver
