Jim Peterson

Jim Peterson was born in Augusta, Georgia, reared and educated on the banks of the Savannah River in western South Carolina. His poetry collections include Speech Minus Applause, The Man Who Grew Silent, An Afternoon With K, The Owning Stone, The Bob and Weave, and Original Face. His poems have won the Benjamin Saltman Award from Red Hen Press, an Academy of American Poets Award, and a Fellowship in Poetry from the Virginia Arts Commission. A number of his plays have been produced in regional theaters. Until his retirement in 2013, he was Coordinator of Creative Writing at Randolph College and was the Pearl S. Buck Writer-in-Residence there in the Fall of 2017. Many years ago, he was founder and editor of the poetry journal Kudzu and later was editor of The Devil’s Millhopper poetry magazine and press. He is now on the faculty of the University of Nebraska-Omaha Low-Res MFA Program in Creative Writing and is professor emeritus at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Commemorating a love story, a marriage, the moments of a shared life both large and small, the poems in Jim Peterson’s Towheaded Stone Thrower: The Harriet Poems flicker through the delights of presence and the griefs of absence like light dappling through trees. —Lee Ann Roripaugh

Praise for Towheaded Stone Thrower

Commemorating a love story, a marriage, the moments of a shared life both large and small, the poems in Jim Peterson’s Towheaded Stone Thrower: The Harriet Poems flicker through the delights of presence and the griefs of absence like light dappling through trees. These are poems that reveal the complex and intertwined histories of self and place, as well as the ways in which a couple learns to recognize themselves within the gaze of the other. Here, the unspoken instincts that connect horse to rider, lover to lover, joy to heartbreak, reverence to irreverence, spirit to body, and earth to cosmos are rendered in gorgeous image and burnished language. Wise, heartrending, and vulnerable, Jim Peterson’s Towheaded Stone Thrower is an ineffably beautiful collection of poems.

—Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50

“This is what we are given”: Towheaded Stone Thrower invites readers into the narrative of a long, extraordinary marriage that's both mystical and deeply grounded in community and the natural world, particularly through the couple's profound connection with horses. As the poems unfold like a time-lapse sequence, we're privileged to witness the relationship from its first moments all the way through Harriet's illness, death, and the aftermath. With exceptional lyric precision and evocative richness of detail, this collection reveals what love offers, what it costs, and "the essential lying beneath it all."

—Claire Bateman, author of Wonders of the Invisible World

This is a book about love. But if you’re looking for something that wears the pancake makeup of sentimentality, it’s not for you. In Towheaded Stone Thrower, Jim Peterson offers a clear-eyed view of an extraordinary life with his wife, Harriet, whose dying he attends with care, grief, and wonder. The love is all-encompassing, a joining of souls with each other, with nature, and with what Peterson calls “the unimaginable wholeness” of “the unknown.” “Not you or me or us, but all of it all at once,” he says of her death. “I can neither have you nor lose you. With and without are banished forever.” But Peterson’s poetry is not abstract. He grounds the spiritual in the world of the senses. The imagery of these poems is powerful and evocative, supported by his impeccable sense of sound and rhythm. So, if you’re looking for poems that are authentic, well-crafted, and often breathtaking, you’ve arrived.

—William Trowbridge, author of Father and Son

Praise for Speech Minus Applause

Speech Minus Applause presents a vast soulscape of loss and longing. The speaker of these powerful poems may not be the poet Jim Peterson; the voice may belong to his solitary Other who has resolved to accept sorrow as a condition of genuine existence. The resolve these lines express is as admirable as the straightforward language that embodies it. In “Whirlwind” the force of loss is revealed in a yearning glimpse: “a whirlwind of leaves / taking the form of your body / for just a moment.” . . . And then the world returns as a gentler loneliness. And then these true poems are possible.

—Fred Chappell, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina

In the neighborhood of Jim Peterson’s Speech Minus Applause, the dog bowl refills itself. There is nothing and everything to do. Thought is the only sound, and strangers, friends, animals and loved ones, old and new, come and go like fragments of light outside the window, travel down tributaries fed by a city, a street, a door, a mouth—a home becomes a body and the body a refuge for introspection and reverie, a leafy whirlwind of memory. In these wise and darkly animated poems, the wrinkled lines between dream and dreamer are called into question, and a curious and grief-struck eye turns to watch itself wander, from room to room, through its own joy and sadness—the voices in Peterson’s newest collection can only, despite their loudest and wildest attempts, speak to themselves, and through that silence, they speak to everyone. 

—Grant Kittrell, author of Let’s Sit Down, Figure This Out

With his love of the uncanny, his keen observations, and his terrific wit, Jim Peterson has delivered up an arresting collection in Speech Minus Applause. Yes, it's a dark book, but it's riddled through with wonder so that it never becomes too heavy to carry.  Filled with language astonishing and astonished, these are poems brimming with things almost said, things caught in the throat, but Peterson's voice is resonant, unfaltering, and true. 

—Jennifer Whitaker, author of The Blue Hour