Andrew Peterson

Museum of Thrown Objects Andrew Peterson

Poetry. Imagine an ocean leaving its bed to hover above itself, where it should not be, to form a 'silhouette' visible against an 'afternoon.' The technology of displacement is deployed, in Andrew Peterson's brilliant book, to create: not 'delay' but 'fusion.' It makes sense, then, to build a museum out of artifacts that would, in the wetness beyond architecture, disappear by 'low tide, ' but are instead 'kept.' Locked away in a decaying archive, 'the thrown objects' form perverse alliances when the lights dim. Where the genitalia should be, for example, are 'leafs and bugs.' Intra-species, foaming, future-soaked, and with a 'metallic corsage' delicately sewn to the wrist, the figures in Peterson's poems come to get you. And they do. They get you and take you somewhere until: 'we are all here together in our new place'--Bhanu Kapil