In the Country of the Peregrine by Wade Stevenson

“Wade Stevenson focuses on reimagining the known image–making foreign that which is familiar in the world of the poem. In this ambitious effort, we see the complexity of love and loss intertwined. In this musically adept collection, I’ve no doubt you’ll find something to love and perhaps even “a last refuge for you.””

—Kyle McCcord, Author of Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult

“In one of his final public statements, the poet Charles Olson avowed “I have lived with my body so long, it must be my soul.” In the Country of the Peregrine, Wade Stevenson records, with dauntless candor and unfailing tenderness, the wanderings of all flesh towards the flesh that is its ultimate home, i.e. towards unity. It is wonderful to discover in these poems a companionship that is also in itself a kind of odyssey, replete with enchantments. This is a most welcoming book.”

—Donald Revell

Like its titular bird of prey, In the Country of the Peregrine veers gracefully among its disparate pursuits, taking peregrination itself—wandering, displacement, diaspora—as characteristic of human life. All existence, Stevenson urges, is part of “an infinitely possible becoming,” the self “a nomad in transit,” caught up, therefore, in wanderings both psychic and spiritual, temporal and corporeal—even the body, in Stevenson’s hands, is revealed to be “swarming alive with protoplasmic neurons.” By turns arch and elegiac, playful and pensive, Stevenson brings us face-to-face with the terror of mortality, at the same time reminding us that death itself is merely one phase in the endless arc of the universe. “One day you’ll find another home,” he writes, “where you always knew you belonged.” These poems feel like precisely such a home, possessed throughout of gorgeous sonic textures and propulsive rhythms, and urging us—insistently, impactfully—toward renewed reverence for the wanderings we are.

— Christopher Kempf

The wonderful poems in Wade Stevenson’s In the Country of the Peregrine are deliberate in their looking back and looking into possibility. Without relying much on punctuation, his poems are not stapled to the page—instead, they leave only the essential and intensifying clarity of a life’s winter years. Expertly controlled line breaks and with raw honesty, the poems balance aging and loss with the grainy purity of Amor, a state of mind as much as a physical place. Many of these images leave lasting echoes and ripples long after the last poem.

—Sean Singer

Wade Stevenson’s In the Country of the Peregrine collapses the two meanings of “peregrine” that open the collection: this book both wanders the landscape of the heart and makes of it a meal. Stevenson’s poems swoop and dash themselves against memory, pain, love, and sex, again and again striving toward the light of healing on the horizon but knowing that way lies treachery. This is a collection full of experience, of the first-hand, excruciating knowledge of “the blackness of the sun / The dynamite brightness of the lunar night.”

— Rachel Abramowitz

Wade Stevenson is a poet unafraid of asking the most ambitious philosophical questions: What multiplicity is housed within language? What emotional, narrative, and metaphysical weight accrues around the words we use every day, those familiar signifiers we only thought we knew? As Stevenson teases out possible answers to these compelling questions, each line shimmers with “a different nuance of light.” This is a stunning and memorable book.

—Kristina Marie Darling, author of ANGEL OF THE NORTH and DAYLIGHT HAS ALREADY COME

In this collection a “wandering” poet gazes at the trajectory of his life. A peregrine is a species of falcon, but the word has multiple meanings, traveler, pilgrim, foreigner. Images of exile and dislocation haunt this volume’s verses, which steal across the boundaries of language, landscape, and personal history. In the opening poem Stevenson invites himself to wonder “how you became a peregrine wanderer?” Poems like “In Memoriam Our Wild Days” and “Birthing Poem” look back on earlier times with nostalgia and regret. The poet is at his most endearing when the language is playful, as in “About Wade,” which begins, “Before I was born Wade / I was a wave / A wave afloat in a vast amniotic sea / I was a wave in the morning, a wave at night/ A sweet tender blue wave at twilight / I wanted wave to be my name.” Death is another country whose border seems to loom ever closer on the horizon. The best poems are the ones in which Stevenson approaches death with wryness and wonder, and there are several moments when readers will be happy to share deeper with him into the dark.

—KIRKUS REVIEWS

There’s an argument to be made that all writers are writing toward death, that every book seeks to archive what will be nothing more than mere memory in the future. Wade Stevenson’s newest collection, In the Country of the Peregrine, in part adheres to such an approach, but rather than strict cataloging, there is a lyrical and narrative thread of understanding, acceptance, and vulnerability found throughout these poems. While Stevenson’s speaker might mourn that they are “just a digit / In that great unwritten book / Of all the nameless, placeless people,” they acknowledge not only the value of everyday life, but the fact that in the end, love and happiness will always outshine regret and missed opportunities. Stevenson’s keen observation of the past and his honest portrayal of the present add to an already accomplished and important oeuvre, and with page after page of such stunning observation, you will be comforted with the notion that when the curtains at last close, it “will be easier to say goodbye” because you too “have loved so much.”

~Esteban Rodríguez, author of The Valley and Before the Earth Devours Us

Wade Stevenson’s In the Country of the Peregrine is that rare achievement: a book whose poems confront death and, without ever shying from the complexities inherent in a life of trauma or the philosophical riddles such complexities engender, embrace love in its highest form, or “Amor” as Stevenson sometimes calls it. “Please make sure you tell the true story–/Even in hellish depths of the tundra season/How I loved beyond logic or reason.” At times almost playful in their rhyming and repeating cadences, these poems plumb the depths of the human soul and teach us, “If death is the last flower of love/ Love is the bloom that crowns the last goodbye.” As a reader, I was entranced by the beauty and wisdom of this book, where the answer to worrying about the existence of an afterlife is “Deeply understanding how the sunlight/Falls on a wall/Or a single calla lily shines.” Let me gaze, with Stevenson, a long time at such sights.

—Gillian Cummings

Wade Stevenson was born in NYC in 1945. Educated at St. Paul’s School, he studied in Paris, and has travelled extensively throughout Asia. His first book, ICE CREAM PARLORS IN ASIA, was published in 1969, thanks to John Ashbery. BEDS (McCall Publishing Co.) became a poetry best seller. His memoir ONE TIME IN PARIS and his novel THE ELECTRIC AFFINITIES both received critical acclaim. He has published more than a dozen poetry books, including THE ABSENCE OF THE LOVED, SONGS OF THE SUN AMOR, and LOVE AT THE END.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 92 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-423-9

$18

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