The Bob and Weave

(Paperback)

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"Despite the lyric tenderness and subtlety of their voices, the poems in iThe Bob and Weave are simultaneously surreal, spooky, and full of brave love for the world's mysteries, visible and invisible. Like an unpredictable wind, this work finds its way into the cracks between everything you think you know, then overflows them."

--Claire Bateman

"Jim Peterson's poems are filled with the things of this world--its horses, hands, stones, and baseball players--but are not themselves its inhabitants. Rather, this poet moves in a realm where 'there is / a space between him and the world and he / tunes it like one string of a violin.' Equally committed to nature, to spirit, to dreams, and to the touch of another human body, Peterson constantly expects 'a message / from something that isn't me / or even like me.' The tensions evolving from this anticipation are by turns erotic, mysterious, and instructively frightening."

--Steven Corey

"With The Bob and Weave, Jim Peterson announces himself as a major American poet. These poems offer insight into both the quotidian and the eternal, and while we hear echoes of his near predecessors--Dickey, Merwin, Hugo, Roethke--the voice in this new collection--assured, resonant, vatic--is entirely Peterson's own."

--David Starkey

Author Bio

Jim Peterson is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. Early books include The Man Who Grew Silent (Bench Press 1989), and An Afternoon With K (Holocene 1996). His Red Hen Press books are The Owning Stone (2000, winner of The Benjamin Saltman Award), Paper Crown (2005), and The Bob and Weave (2006). Two poetry chapbooks have also been published: Carvings on a Prayer Tree (1994) and Jim Peterson's Greatest Hits (2001, 2003). His poems have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Texas Review, Connecticut Review, Southern Poetry Review, and The Journal. His poetry was awarded a Poetry Fellowship from the Virginia Commission on the Arts in 2002-03. A number of his plays have been produced in regional and college theatres around the country. He is writer-in-residence and coordinator of creative writing at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia where he lives with his wife, Harriet, and their beloved Welsh Corgi, Dylan Thomas.