A Piece of Good News

Book excerpt: 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.