Books by Geoff Peterson

A man drives a thousand miles and lands in Mesquite, a desert town northeast of Vegas and tucked along a mountain corridor with Utah. He gets a room at a motel and prepares to look for an old friend. Woodrow by name, whereabouts unknown. But a deep inertia takes over and the best he can do is watch cable news and log entries in a journal called "Alone, with groceries," which is what he is, just sitting, waiting, and using the toilet. It's strange to be old and aimless, and lost without the company of a friend. Life is good when it's all in the past and soon forgotten.

Always read a book of poems back to front so that the wave rolls backward… Now apply the same method to your whole life.In Death Work the poet does just that. By rewinding fragments from memory, he bears witness to attachment and its eventual unraveling. This is the point where the sheer weight of a man's past opens his heart to the mystery. The Japanese have a word for it: jisei, death poems that express a sudden alertness to the fact of this world and the emergence of another. Death Work tracks one man's descent into clarity, a decompression chamber linking life and death. "Thought is a staircase," he writes, then erases it.

Archipelago is a vision of the historical past in collision with the future. First glimpsed in a dream over forty years ago, the poet traces the evolution of the underlying myth in poems over the course of one life.

And now we come to Trance States, the twenty-third book listed under Petersons Literature of Missing Persons: Would anyone care to begin? If not, let me say its not often we encounter such a flat-footed character as the ghost lurking in the halls of this book. I cannot, in all good conscience, call it poetry, nor recommend it. We return it to its author with the suggestion that he relax his obsession with the mysterious Margot of his imagination.Geoff Peterson