Life in a Field: Poems (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781632430908)

This is a comedy about climate change, in which a girl and a donkey become friends, then decide to marry time.

A lyric fable, Life in a Field intersperses Katie Peterson's slow-moving, cinematic, and sensual writing with three folios of photographs by Young Suh. Introspection, wish, dream, and memory mark this tale, which is set in a location resembling twenty-first-century California--with vistas and orchards threatened by drought and fires. This is also a place of enchantment, a fairy-tale landscape where humans and animals live as equals. As the girl and the donkey grow up, they respond to the difficulties of contemporary civilization, asking a question that meets our existential moment: What do you do with the story you didn't wish for? A narrator's voice combines candor with distance, attempting to find a path through our familiar strife, toward a future that feels all but impossible, and into what remains of beauty and pleasure. Life in a Field tries to reverse our accelerating destruction of the natural world, reminding us of "the cold clarity we need to continue on this earth."

Author: Katie Peterson
ISBN-10: 1632430908
ISBN-13: 9781632430908
Publisher: Omnidawn
Language: English
Published: 05/01/2021
Pages: 104
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.31lbs
Size: 8.80h x 6.00w x 0.40d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 05/17/2021