MARK PETTERSON

Mark Petterson’s poems inspire to go for a hike, to be still and watch the birds and raccoons and other small animals, adopt one of them and nurse it back to health after I’ve run it over with my car, get drunk, research the rainiest location in the world and move there with a backpack, attend mass for the first time since last Christmas, write (not poems—I don’t know how to write poems—but prose), and contact all of my exes to allow them the opportunity to reject me one more time, all from the comfort of my living room. One day, however, I will take Transfiguration on a bus, perhaps, pausing occasionally to look out the window to see what I’m missing.

Mary Miller, author of Biloxi and Always Happy Hour

One of the speakers in Mark Petterson’s debut book learns from his friend that there’s no place you can go where light and shadow don’t go too, except he (the speaker in the poem, the friend he learns it from, and Petterson himself) says it better than that. Petterson’s poems are careful and right and full of wisdom and heart and humans’ lives and God, meaning laughter and pizza and raccoons and detours you take to get where you need to be. Petterson is a remarkable poet and I am grateful for his work. 

Rebecca Brown, author of The Gifts of the Body and Not Heaven, Somewhere Else

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These are worldly poems, both in subject and approach. And Petterson has an eye for just the right detail to reveal the world, just as a poem or short story can do the work a novel does, in miniature, in a camera flash. There’s both grit and tenderness here. Read this, and you may come away comforted or wiser, and certainly you’ll know a little more of the world.”  

Kevin Rabas, author of Everyone Just Wants to Drum, Poet Laureate of Kansas, 2017-2019