Fragile Acts

by Allan Peterson

The world is terrifying and exhilarating. Believing firmly in the romantic notion that “embellishment is love,” Allan Peterson in Fragile Acts combines the intellectual force of T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, the ethereal wonder of Robert Hass, and the tight lyric beauty of Elizabeth Bishop and Donald Hall. These steely, wide-ranging poems are at once personal and philosophical, incisive and meditative—funny, serious, compassionate and searching.

Juxtaposing the fast pace of contemporary society with the quiet localism and naturalism of the great American transcendentalists, Peterson's sinewy, muscular collection reveals a profoundly intelligent, curious mind leaping from object to thought to emotion. And yet, poem after poem, Peterson somehow binds seemingly unrelated elements into one stunning whole. You’ll nod your head in reflection one moment and laugh out loud the next. These moving poems are a profound delight to read.

Peterson writes with wondering beauty: “As a child I knew I was sleeping when I began / falling though still furled in my sheets / and I would look over other people’s shoulders / to see what they were reading / the headlines the footnotes / Extra! Extra! / a boy has left his room through a map on the wall.”
And again later, with a sly smile: “When she twirled and slapped / a mosquito and missed, a red sun stayed on her leg throughout / most of the chapter on Self Reliance.”

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Hardcover

First published June 12, 2012

About the author

Allan Peterson is the author of This Luminous, New and Selected Poems (Panhandler Books) finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Precarious (42 Miles Press),Fragile Acts (McSweeney's) finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, All the Lavish in Common (2005 Juniper Prize) and Anonymous Or (Defined Providence Press Prize 2001) as well as 8 chapbooks. He has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and the State of Florida, and represented the U.S, at the 2010 Cuisle International Poetry Festival, Ireland. His chapbook, Other Than They Seem, won the 2014 Snowbound prize from Tupelo Press. His poetry has appeared widely in print and online journals. He lives and writes in Ashland, Oregon.

Reviews

[Steven Tomcavage · Rating 4 out of 5]

Allan Peterson's "Fragile Acts" is a slim volume - only 84 pages - but it took me three weeks to work my way through it. The poems are so marvelously dense that I found they had to sit with me for a while before I could move on to the next one. For the most part they seem similarly structured. He starts with a theme which gets abandoned before it is fully developed and he then turns to a theme which becomes the heart of the poem. It seems as if the initial image of the poem triggers the main theme, but Peterson leaves the the initial image intact as a testament to the process. Most of the poems seem to focus on how humans continually try to see the mysterious in what is inherently non-mysterious. Death is just death. Religion is just diversion. Nature is just natural laws. The mysterious is often our insistence on organizing disparate events into a revelation that's just not there. These poems constantly challenge the comfortable, and that is what makes this book so wonderful.

[Jimmy Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

Calling this garbage seems churlish as someone clearly valued it enough to give due care and attention to the publishing of the hardback copy but I could find almost nothing redeeming in this. It's not clever or funny or insightful or moving. I could barely find a single line of even slight interest

[Kat · Rating 2 out of 5]

Look there were some good lines and interesting imagery but for the most part this was trying too hard to be different and profound that it just stopped making sense. Stringing pretty words together and having a free hand with grammar does not a poem make.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is like tasting an exotic vintage, strange and complex, inexplicable, requiring exegesis while answering in mystic aphorisms

[Hans · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is hard in our 24-7-365 lives to find the head space for poetry. It's not something that you can truly appreciate while cars pound by outside, some kid is screaming nearby, the radio or tv blares in the background, and your pocket keeps buzzing because you still haven't turned off the alerts for the AP news app.

Since I subscribed to the McSweeney's Poetry series, I've tried to find this head space. I really loved a lot of what I read and absorbed in Fragile Acts, but think I would have to come through a second, third, or fourth time to really pick up all of what Allan Peterson is trying to share.

Peterson blurs the lines between nature, science, and the simple act of being human.

Some of my favorites:
--"Eight Presidents":

"Nothing really shines but this: I have loved you / eight presidents. Forty years. Five point seven in dog."

--"Local News":

"The local news is motionless and dries / around the event leaving a hardly perceptible ring / Sometimes a marker will be placed near an incident / so readers must go to it / instead of leaving to wander the country mouth to mouth"

--"Headlines":

"Headlines reaffirm we learn geography by wars."

--Untitled:

"We said there were nine planets / We took one back for not being big enough / We rethought the decision"

[D'Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good stuff. Different from the more narrative-driven/shaped poetry I usually am drawn to. This felt/was good for me.

Incidentally, after reading the following stanza:

"It was like opening Webster's to "emptiness," void,
the invisible axis around which a rose opens,
the disappearance inside the "o" of the ring binder,
a hole leading to nothing but another like itself
and a blank page awaiting explanation."

My first thought: this is totally a poetic analysis of Mitt Romney's "binders full of women" comment.

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Allan Peterson's poems are personal and dense, at times the interiority of some of the poems may even strike readers as obtuse, but the juxtaposition of imaginary and strange abstraction does make both more real. Peterson thus does a lot of his poetic work in contrast. The flurries of natural imaginary often punctuate poems that could become too idiosyncratic without being rooted in something beyond the mental landscapes Peterson seems interested in. Like a lot of the McSweeny poetry series, it will be a polarizing collection.

[Debs · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is probably a collection I need to own, or that I at least need to wait to reread until it is no longer due in 14 days from the library. These poems are so densely populated with images and ideas that I feel as though you need to spend at least a day with each one to wring everything out of it.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a beautifully bound book. My first McSweeney's poetry series purchase, and the gorgeous binding alone was worth it. I liked the poems, though I've liked other Allan Peterson poems better--these were sometimes too obtuse, and I like obtuse. But many were not.

[Matthew Yeldon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Favourite line: “our viscera displayed like a wreck of Christmas”

Favourite Poems: ‘Nightmare’ and ‘Headlines’

All a bit too cryptic for my taste, but there are some powerful through-lines, a red and green tone, glass and water interchanging, repeats of the moon, and branchless birds throughout.

[Luis Correa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great, big metaphysical swirl.