Overview

Keeling tracks Sarah Peecher's memories through churning spaces and documentation-the church, school, a childhood bedroom, fields, and gardens; an etymology, a transcription, and a log of the body. It pins together memories in double vision through a pair of ""diplopia"" poems and explores memory's disintegration through poems with disappearing words. Along the way, a persona known as the Girl carefully observes a wildfire's destruction. These poems speak to Peecher's hankering for a dismantling of the structures that stifled her in her youth and the simultaneously dizzying reverberations felt from their loss. Through her mother's wisdom and stories, combined with her own resilience, the poet discovers that just because she's keeling, doesn't mean she'll never find solid ground.

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9798899900075

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Reviews

The speaker of Keeling asks, ""What does a fox with a rabbit mean?"" Peecher answers in compelling poetic structures, surveying the struggles of girlhood, spirituality, and sexuality under a mother's worried eye. How does one soothe a mother? How does one let a mother go? The way I see it after reading Peecher's debut chapbook is that sometimes you're the perishing rabbit and sometimes you're all teeth. -C. M. Burroughs Sarah Peecher's Keeling reimagines personal history through the complex double exposures of memory. Taken together, these poems create a multivocal, controlled-burn of a narrative. In relentlessly innovative poetic forms, the self is continually made and remade as it walks through the flames of individual and social conflagration. ""After all the smoke & mirrors, I will finally be honest,"" Peecher writes. ""I don't want to be modest. I am a medley & melodious & I will look the part."" -Tony Trigilio If ""keeling"" means turning over on its side, as in a ship capsizing, the poems in Sarah Peecher's debut chapbook will not be knocked over so easily. In fact, Keeling is the story of a self-made turning over, a young woman's reinvention of self. With hearts ""bounding like an arctic hare,"" we follow ""a girl at a precipice"" on a pivotal journey of wayfinding hard-won through interrogation of religious upbringing and bodily autonomy and the emergence of queer identity. As a poet, Peecher leverages the immensity of small moments, slowing time equally for trauma (a car accident, a drowning) and joy (dancing in a bar). Having once prayed to stay ""eternally invisible,"" this poet's got her ""stompiest boots on"" now, and she's determining where and by whom she wishes to be seen and heard. -Cynthia Marie Hoffman, author of Exploding Head

Author Information

A lifelong lover of language, Gus Peterson lives and writes in Maine while working a day job in industrial sales. Published both locally and across the pond, this is his first full length collection.

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