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A lake drains. A foal is born on an ark. A grandmother disappears into herself by degrees. Peterson is watching all of it with the same unblinking attention, and what she finds is that these are not separate events. In Degenerate Era of an Expanding Universe, the domestic and the cosmological are not two registers but one, grief and tenderness operating at different scales of the same phenomenon. The line breaks arrive like small trapdoors. The poems do not announce their devastations. They simply open, and you fall. This book is a marvel.
– Charlotte Pence, author of Code and Many Small Fires
"Reading the supple poems of Jennifer Peterson’s first collection, you’ll find language at once sensuous and pragmatic, formal and unnerving. Her book is an ark with a universe inside it. Making room for a miracle or two, it shows us how gentleness can coexist with fierce love, ruin reverse itself into new life, and form assume the pure fluidity of touch. In each line you’ll find the abrasion of the actual but also grace and unlooked for awakening."
– Angela Ball, author of Steeplechase
"In these deft and incisive poems, Jennifer Peterson reckons with climate crisis, motherhood, memory, and the cosmos, and gives domestic life its full and startling due. ‘These gifted lilies,’ writes Peterson, ‘…blare and stain themselves gold. / The table holds their wreck of petals, / and more buds crescendo every day.’ I’m so moved and arrested by the ringing resonance of Jennifer Peterson's voice. Degenerate Era of an Expanding Universe is a book that will stay with you—and you’ll be so grateful for its wise company."
– Catherine Pierce, author of Dear Beast
Jennifer Peterson’s Degenerate Era of an Expanding Universe is a hard book. But, by “hard,” I don’t mean “difficult.” By “hard,” I mean “engaged honestly with the world.” These poems call to mind truths about life too often unacknowledged—truths, especially, about caregiving, its difficult, easy wonders. By such truths, the world is encompassed, and the greatest of mortal purposes described. Books about such things ought to be hard. But rarely are books about such things written so well, so wrenchingly, as this.
– Shane McCrae, author of New and Collected Hell: A Poem
"Jennifer Polson Peterson’s Must Resemble Leisure is wonderful in the truest sense of the word. These poems about motherhood are unsentimental and precise, and I love this poet’s careful eye: 'I breathed in / the smoke of you, child—fire / I set to burn my own house down.' Or: 'I turned down / wine and every lush, unpasteurized / cheese in France that pregnant / summer.' In every poem, I find myself saying yes to someone else’s experience of the world. This is what we all want when we come to poetry, but the feeling is usually rare. Not here. Pay attention to this book. Jennifer Polson Peterson has done the hard work for all of us."
-Charles Rafferty, author of A Cluster of Noisy Planets
“The poems in Must Resemble Leisure are beautiful hymns to motherhood—full of wonder, lyricism, and fortitude. Jennifer Polson Peterson’s poems feel alive and brimming. They pulse with images I won’t soon forget, with lines that blossom and transfix.”
-Olivia Clare Friedman, author of An Arm Fixed to a Wing
"Jennifer Polson Peterson’s Must Resemble Leisure unpacks the complicated question of what it means to bring a child into a world on fire. These poems do not offer an answer—rather, they dwell in the space between love and loss. Peterson is an expert cartographer charting the complicated nature of the domestic, a place where we observe 'the blessed punctuation of the bloody days' and yet somehow daily 'loop / our troubles into something like lace.'"
-Adam Clay, author of Circle Back