Life in a Field: Poems

by Katie Peterson

This is a comedy about climate change, in which a girl and a donkey become friends, then decide to marry time.

A lyric fable, Life in a Field intersperses Katie Peterson’s slow-moving, cinematic, and sensual writing with three folios of photographs by Young Suh. Introspection, wish, dream, and memory mark this tale, which is set in a location resembling twenty-first-century California—with vistas and orchards threatened by drought and fires. This is also a place of enchantment, a fairy-tale landscape where humans and animals live as equals. As the girl and the donkey grow up, they respond to the difficulties of contemporary civilization, asking a question that meets our existential What do you do with the story you didn’t wish for? A narrator’s voice combines candor with distance, attempting to find a path through our familiar strife, toward a future that feels all but impossible, and into what remains of beauty and pleasure. Life in a Field tries to reverse our accelerating destruction of the natural world, reminding us of “the cold clarity we need to continue on this earth.”

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 2021

Reviews

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don’t you love when a book does everything you’ve ever wanted a book to do but you hadn’t known it until you made your way through it? Incredible.

[kari · Rating 4 out of 5]

i’m not really sure what i’m meant to have gotten from this—there were many very beautiful lines to be sure but overall it was just kind of meditative and quiet but i didn’t get a good sense of a thesis or anything

edit: we talked about it in class turns out im just dumb. this book is awesome

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I mean, this is pretty great. Publishers Weekly says it was "driven by a detached and unhurried eloquence."

[ari · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely amazing story. Honestly not sure what it was about, but does poetry have to have a "meaning?" It touched me in mysterious ways, and I think that's what matters.