stars on a wire

allan
peterson

Forward to the web chapbook

One of the great pleasures of editing this little journal has been getting to know Allan Peterson's work and, via the miracle of email, getting to know Allan a bit.  (About five years ago, I decided it was ok to refer to someone I only know on the Internet as a "friend.")  I've published a good amount of Allan's work, including a previous web chapbook. There's no poet writing today whose work I enjoy more than Allan Peterson's.  Wonderful imagery.  A talent for artfully expressing what an artist observes and thinks as he moves through his life.  And perhaps most of all, rich and beautiful language.  I've piled up some education in my time and I rarely read Allan's poems for long before discovering a handful of lovely new words--or at least words used in an unexpected way.

A couple of years ago, Allan gifted me with a set of unbound pages from his long out-of-print chapbook, Stars on a Wire, which had been designed and letterpress-printed through the University of Alabama's Book Arts MFA program.  I recently visited the University's Book Arts collection and sat at a mahogany table and reread these eleven poems.  I decided that day in Tuscaloosa that I wanted more people to read these. 

One other thing.  Most of these poems are over our usual length-limit.  Not one of them seems a word too long.

Dale Wisely

A PDF version of this chapbook can be downloaded by clicking here. 

a  right hand pointing web chapbook