Forward to the
web chapbook
One
of the great pleasures of editing this little
journal has been getting to know Allan
Peterson's work and, via the miracle of email,
getting to know Allan a bit. (About five
years ago, I decided it was ok to refer to
someone I only know on the Internet as a
"friend.") I've published a good amount of
Allan's work, including a
previous web chapbook. There's no poet
writing today whose work I enjoy more than Allan
Peterson's. Wonderful imagery. A
talent for artfully expressing what an artist
observes and thinks as he moves through
his life. And perhaps most of all, rich
and beautiful language. I've piled up some
education in my time and I rarely read Allan's
poems for long before discovering a handful of
lovely new words--or at least words used in an
unexpected way.
A
couple of years ago, Allan gifted me with a set
of unbound pages from his long out-of-print
chapbook, Stars on a Wire, which had
been designed and letterpress-printed through
the University of Alabama's Book Arts MFA
program. I recently visited the
University's Book Arts collection and sat at a
mahogany table and reread these eleven
poems. I decided that day in Tuscaloosa
that I wanted more people to read these.
One
other thing. Most of these poems are over
our usual length-limit. Not one of them
seems a word too long.
Dale Wisely
A PDF version of
this chapbook can be downloaded by clicking
here.
a
right hand pointing web
chapbook
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