Description

Precarious
Poems
by Allan Peterson
paperback, 91 pages
2014

Allan Peterson, in Precarious, his fifth full-length collection of poems, refuses the easy path of a consoling clarity, opting instead for a difficulty that more accurately reveals the blurred perspective of one human being's singular fixity from his place in Nature. What there is to see or know shifts, hardens into focus, then flies away into the collapsing moment when the eye misperceives or the mind suddenly remembers or misremembers... or comes to rest on a centering image or idea. It is challenging poetry and yet there isn't a trace of cynicism in this work. Like a modern-day Cezanne, Allan Peterson writes poems that slowly clarify via the subconscious, moving by increments into focus in the conscious mind. The attention to detail functions as a mosaic that coalesces into a whole by poem's end, and we are but a fragment of the world depicted. And yet, like Peterson, we are also actively engaged in this splintering into wholeness.

Reviews:

The poems in Precarious are profound and rewarding. Allan Peterson's poetry is truly prismatic, suggesting a complex mind philosophically engaged with a rich world, a world in which we can only come to know our interior selves through interaction with a glimmering, constantly shifting, ungraspable reality. "The brain," he writes, "has a sense of itself / the mind, and the mind / has a sense of itself, the soul / and the soul sees itself / in others...." Witty, filled with intensity of music, image and intelligence, this is Allan Peterson at his very best.
—Kevin Prufer

Allan Peterson is the kind of poet that makes me want to call in sick from the office so I can stay home all day reading his work, he makes me want to shoplift copies of his books to give to friends, he's the kind of poet I would perjure myself for. In short I would lie, steal, and cheat if it meant having Allan Peterson's poetry in the world."
—Matthew Dickman

"Who speaks for the body? We do," says Allan Peterson in this luminous, tumbling collection. In it, he also speaks for the mind, writing into the exploratory spaces where thing connects to idea, where self attaches to other, where line leads to line. The poems in Precarious are hardly likely to topple, but rather they assemble layered evidences of attention, of attending. "The weed field had been / readying its many damp handkerchiefs," writes Peterson, and his poems are also records of the mind's meander, the slipperiness of thought unfurling, as when he explains, "we look at one thing to describe another." In these poems we watch ourselves watching. With Peterson, we find that the common is not alike each time and therefore misnamed, that thought leads to thought, line to line, and that the exceptions are numinous, as we sing our way to the unexplored interior. Precarious is startling, and visionary.
—Tess Taylor

About the Author

Allan Peterson is the author of five books, including Fragile Acts (McSweeney's Poetry Series), a finalist for both the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award and the Oregon Book Award; As Much As (Salmon Press, Ireland); All the Lavish in Common (2005 Juniper Prize, University of Massachusetts); Anonymous Or (Defined Providence Press Prize); and six chapbooks, notably Omnivore (Bateau Press), winner of the 2009 Boom Prize; Any Given Moment (Right Hand Pointing online); and Stars on a Wire (University of Alabama's Institute for the Book Arts, 1989). His work was selected by Poet Laureate Ted Kooser for his American Life in Poetry Series (#159) and appears in several anthologies: American Poetry At the End of the Millennium; Poetry of the American Apocalypse; Don't Leave Hungry: 50 Years of the Southern Poetry Review; as well as in critical essays in Stephen Burt's Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry. He has received prizes from, among others, Alligator Juniper, Arts & Letters, GSU Review, the American Poet Prize, Comstock Review, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and The State of Florida. He read from his work at the 2010 Cuisle International Poetry Festival in Limerick, Ireland, and was a poetry panelist at the 61st Conference on World Affairs, University of Colorado.