WINNER OF THE 2021CPR BOOK AWARD
“The poems in Lee Peterson’s In the Hall of North American Mammals explore the haunting, dangerous borders between story and reality, domestic and wild, mother and child. These poems are meditations crafted in the terror of familial love. And they are bold navigations, crossing liminal spaces, using a luminous intensity of voice to map intimacy, mortality. Peterson’s deft poems cross a ropewalk of mother-love, knowing what they dare. Hold your breath for their fierce power.”
—Sally Rosen Kindred, author of Where the Wolf
“A grandmother, the wolf, and a landscape of hills lite by dusk and snow populate Peterson’s radiant new collection. Frequently dwelling the world of fairytale, Peterson trains her lend on mother-love and the sublime act of mothering: ‘With one hand I lift you up/with the other I set you down, set you out.’ Showcasing Peterson’s spare images and Dickinsonian-dash-inflected lines, In the Hall of North American Mammals evokes the fierce and tender tether between mother and child.”
—Shara McCallum, author of No Ruined Stone
“Jean Valentine describes Lee Peterson’s first book, Room and Fields: Dramatic Monologues from the War in Bosnia, as ‘compassionate and single-mindedly alive to its high purpose.’ Peterson’s second full-length collection, In the Hall of North American Mammals, continues with as much heart and intention, though the subject has changed. These poems, spare and intimate, come from ‘inside of the inside of [Peterson’s] voice,’ speaking to her daughter’s place in the natural world, the world in her daughter. Splendid, moving, and enlivened, this book takes me beyond the old models and myths, beyond what I already know, to a place both familiar and strange.”
—Blas Falconer, author of Forgive the Body This Failure
“While moving through both the terrors of parenting and the even more frightening recognition that children have to be let go, this book still finds ways to acknowledge the delicacy and tension of childrearing with grace and whimsy. While managing that nerve-inducing balance, it also finds the ways in which, like nearly every 17th century Dutch still life painting, being a parent paints everything in life with an eye to inevitable mortality. Turning the Red Riding Hood narrative into a leitmotif that meditates on the fragility of both those who let go and those who are let go turns the book into an exquisite and ferocious intersection between language and discomfort.
— Devon Miller-Dugan, Judge