Praise for Towheaded Stone Thrower: The Harriet Poems

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