Was There No Interlude When Light Sprawled the Fen by K. Alma Peterson

K. Alma Peterson’s language is vividly pictorial. And some of her poems are composed as a visual field. But not for the sake of the eye alone does Peterson write–her poems are saturated with feeling, too, as they suggest, one by one, the emotionally complex stories of family life and of the spiritual consolations of nature. Over both land and water, through house and through time, move the questioning protagonists of her poems. And Peterson’s poetic ear is as keen as her artistic eye: her vocabulary is filled with surprises and striking metaphors, and her wonderfully deft compositions are as interesting to hear as music. She writes–to paraphrase one of her poems–for our entirety.

—Reginald Gibbons

Early in the collection of poems by K. Alma Peterson the narrator of the poem, “Woman with Fichus, Husband, Children” is instructed to “get out of the shadow.” In this book, K. Alma Peterson stands clearly in the spotlight that all exceptional and significant poets deserve. This is a remarkable and beautiful collection–no one else could have written these poems. I’ve been a reader of Peterson’s poems for years–it has been my good fortune to read and consider her unerring images, to be caught and held in her syntactical web. These poems conjure a family in all its complications and sorrows, all its beauty and pathos. In “A Map of Blue” the poet says, “for all involved with time/have histories” and Peterson is a fair poet–the characters she writes about, whether in shadow or sunlight, are written about with great attention to the human journeys they have embarked on. I hope this book finds the wide readership it deserves; K. Alma Peterson is a poet worthy of great attention and admiration, and this book, in its wisdom and beauty, only gets better with each reading.

—Deborah Keenan

Wryly observant and joyously languaged, this book is the work of a poet passionately in love with words and things and words as things.   Read these poems and listen to them—every note is pitch perfect. Was There No Interlude when Light Sprawled the Fen is an exuberant achievement.

—Karen Brennan, author of The Real Enough World

If there were a video game simulating the movements of these poems – where they alight, the rock-em-sock-em play of language – then the players would be quick and the scope of vision wide and sly, missing nothing.  Also, any player would wear seventeen petticoats, to signify the layers of language and of worked-on and worked-out thought, and if the game had a soundtrack, why, it would sing with authority, something messy and operatic.  These poems are brilliant, tender, funny, ginormous.  You don’t even know how you need this book.

— Terri Ford, author of Why the Ships Are She and Hams beneath the Firmament

________________
K. Alma Peterson holds an undergraduate degree in Mathematics Education from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. She owns an appraisal company, and writes daily. She is the author of a chapbook, Befallen, published in 2009 by Propaganda Press. Her poems have appeared widely in online and print journals, including FinNALA, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The New Orphic Review, Perihelion Review, qarrtsiluni, Wicked Alice, and others. She lives in Rosemount, MN with her husband, Pete and their cat, Dana.

Was There No Interlude When Light Sprawled the Fen by K. Alma Peterson Book Preview