SINCE I MOVED IN
Tim Peterson

winner of the first Gil Ott Memorial Book Award
Editors for the book series: Charles Alexander, Eli Goldblatt, Myung Mi Kim, and Nathaniel Mackey
$16.00, 96 pages

Reviews

In Tim Peterson’s vividly engaging first collection, the voice ¬ voicing ¬ becomes a character that bobs, weaves, tacks, leaps, & refuses to take no for an answer. These gyroscopic acrobatics make the new not an idea but a performance. Peterson’s not just moved in, he’s made a home for himself on the block and invited us over. Hear, hear!
— Charles Bernstein

In this self-reflective investigation Tim Peterson sensitively probes the nuances of transformation via language. The poise of consciousness: the body’s positioning interlaced with the mind reservoir of move is calculated, and also nonchalant. This surface is taut with signal. The incongruities are provocative, the language, stunning.
— Brenda Iijima

In Tim Peterson’s amazing first book, with its haunted, puzzled, delighted aplomb and its self-wounding, self-delighting nouveau Lacanian calculus, desire is the restless remainder of body subtracted from voice, or maybe it’s voice from body. Whitmanian in its quick and tender grandeur, its penchant for direct address, and its abstract kinkiness and longing, Since I Moved In moves exorably from the transgendering (non) performance of “Trans Figures” to the startled, suspended chiliasm of “Spontaneous Generation,” where at last the fetish body, dispersed into landscape, becomes simply an ambient mode of seeing, or saying, in a post-everything ecology where voice broods over the face of the waters, becoming the (prosthetic) body of the world. Poised to what?
— Tenney Nathanson

Spinoza said we do not know what the body can do. We also do not know what poetry can do. Tim Peterson’s commanding work is all about a new Gaia-like hypothesis: that the body is a unity like the earth, and that the strangest seeming perversions are as ordinary as a pet or rat. Transgendered, trans-naturalistic, trans-cutaneous are all the styles he has on his palette to offer up the “internality of the body,” also, the lived and vulnerable prose poetry of entrail and trail. This is Peterson’s courageous knife against torpor, dogma and stupidity. You will be dazzled and perhaps deflowered by this kind of originality and attack. Now you know a little more about what poetry can be.
— David Shapiro