some deer left the yard moving day by Andrew K Peterson

"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

Andrew K. Peterson’s poetry publications include karaoke lipsync opera (White Sky Press, 2012), Museum of Thrown Objects (BlazeVOX, 2010), bonjour meriwether and the rabid maps (Equinox Chapbook Contest runner up, Fact-Simile Press 2011), and two collaborative chapbooks with the word ‘here’ in the titles: Here Come the Groovies (with Joseph Cooper), and Between Here and the Telescopes (with Elizabeth Guthrie). He edits the online journal summer stock, and lives in Massachusetts.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-048-4