ROOMS and FIELDS

Winner of the 2003 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize - Kent State University Press

“These poems are full of surprises: the gods talk; ancient authors talk; the dictionary talks; very memorably, the bridge over the Drina River, roughly between Bosnia and Serbia, speaks two haunting poems. The dead talk, wolves talk, a teacher talks, with a chorus. Sometimes I like to imagine this long poem being staged. What the music would be! Who would do the sets! What languages . . . Lee Peterson’s Rooms and Fields: Dramatic Monologues from the War in Bosnia doesn’t have a single wasted breath; its sense of necessity never lets up; I always feel that the people and animals and landscapes being written about are being honored. The work is compassionate and single-mindedly alive to its high purpose. What a rare thing it is to find the meeting of historical, political, and poetic wisdom.”
—Jean Valentine, Judge

“Lee Peterson’s dramatic monologues take us on a powerful and daring journey into the voices of those caught in the war in Bosnia. She tells us to listen to these stories that take ‘the world apart in pieces, pieces…held for a moment then set down.’ Rooms and Fields offers an ongoing meditation on human suffering, insisting on the necessity of becoming aware.”
—Nathalie Handal

“Rooms and Fields is a brave essay in empathy, a bold attempt to imagine the lives of ordinary people caught up in the throes of war. Lee Peterson’s dramatic monologues from the killing fields and living rooms of Bosnia reveal the dreams and griefs of an entire generation trapped in ‘a winter of sound.’ Listen hard: this is, as the poet said, ‘news that stays news.’”
—Christopher Merrill

“The poems in Lee Peterson’s Rooms and Fields are clear-eyed, starkly eloquent, and—now more than ever—necessary. Building a shattered world of war one human being at a time, Rooms and Fields demands to be read through as a whole while individual poems are burned into our memory. Together, the book’s varied voices bear witness to an appalling moment in history that we also understand is our own moment. This is a devastating and beautiful collection”
—Joan Larkin

Rooms and Fields is history not simply documented and explored but also deeply felt. A poetic inquiry, its concerns are uniquely and fundamentally intimate. Compassion drives this collection of spare and gracious poems.