A NY Times ‘Best Poetry Book’
- A Piece of Good News: Poems
- By Katie Peterson, associate professor of English
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Feb. 26, 2019; paperback Feb. 18, 2020
Her fourth collection of poetry, named by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best poetry books of 2019. Said The Times: “Peterson’s prickly, playful book is filled with quasi parables (including a poem called “New Parable”) that often keep an attractive distance from their own sponsoring emotions — attractive in part because when Peterson chooses to narrow that gap, the results are striking.”
The publisher writes: “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.”
Audio: Peterson reads “After the Disaster” and “A Piece of Good News.”
The interiors of motherhood
- For Hunger
- By Margaret Ronda, assistant professor of English
- Saturnalia, October 2018
Her second book of poetry, a follow-up to Personification, winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, 2009. For Hunger offers what her publisher describes as “a fierce look at the interiors of motherhood, examining what it means to become a mother and lose a mother.” The publisher continued: “These intimate poems dwell in the drifts, uncanny repetitions, and shocks that characterize the strange temporality of loss.”
McPherson in Ploughshares
- “After Trauma”
- By Sandra McPherson, professor emerita of English
- Included in the spring issue of Ploughshares, published by Emerson College
McPherson taught creative writing and poetry-as-literature courses at UC Davis for 23 years. Before that, she taught for four years in the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, served as the Holloway Lecturer at UC Berkeley and conducted several years of classes for the Oregon Writers Workshop/Pacific Northwest College of Art. She founded Swan Scythe Press, a poetry chapbook publishing venture, in 1999.
She has published numerous collections and has another one coming: Quicksilver, Cougars and Quartz, from Salmon Poetry Press.