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Degenerate Era of an Expanding Universe is a book about apocalypses large and small. The poems in this meditative debut collection explore economic and climatological trends toward dissolution, and how these forces seep into the domestic sphere. Whether exploring the constellations of family dynamics or observing natural and human disasters, Jennifer Polson Peterson reflects on “the newly unmade world” that nonetheless urges us to continue rebuilding.
"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