SINCE
I MOVED IN
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Reviews 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. 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? 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. Transsexual, transgendered,
trans-naturalistic 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.
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