The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep - Paperback
by Trace Peterson (Author)
The second book of poems by Trace Peterson, The Valleys Are So Lush And Steep, attempts to answer the question: what do you do after you've introduced yourself? Modeling aspects of trans interiority, embodied experiences, struggles, and desires from the era before the "trans tipping point" to our present state of emergency, this book also speaks to universal issues of how self, imagination, language, and the environment are intertwined; how gender can structure anyone's experience as both limiting and enabling. Through lyric poems, prose poems, serial poems, and texts that disrupt prosody and invent new forms, Peterson uses humor, non sequitur, equanimity, and anger to critique deserving targets and celebrate trans joy where she can glimpse it. Her love poems, protest poems, elegies, and pastoral poetry put queer romance in conversation with a utopian ecopoetics of enthusiastically unnatural nature. Jamie Lee Curtis, sporks, Black Lives Matter, hydro-powered turbines, Sappho, violets, Laverne Cox, art history, Imogen Binnie, wedding bouquets, Michael Kors, drones, gurus, Caitlyn Jenner, wasps, and Mark Rothko share pages with ecosystems that become courtly allegories, scenes of interrogation, or potential leads for a path out of this mess. This powerful, complex book speaks to trans and non-trans audiences alike, leaving a record of distinct, memorable interventions in communities of both poetry and life.
Trace Peterson is a poet, editor, and literary scholar. She is the author of two books of poetry: The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep (Saturnalia Books), and Since I Moved In, which won the 2007 Gil Ott Award from Chax Press and was republished as Since I Moved In (new & revised) in 2019. Peterson is co-editor of Arrive on Wave: Collected Poems of Gil Ott (Chax Press, 2016) and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2013). She also edits EOAGH, a literary journal and small press which has won a National Jewish Book Award and two Lambda Literary Awards.
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