False-Positive: the Quarantine Verses

A Book At War With ItselfI had completed my earlier book, dotted the i’s and licked the stamps, and then…SOMETHING HAPPENEDand there was nothing more to say.—geoff petersonFalse-Positive is an author’s kiss of death. Beginning in the silence that precedes thought, it slips between sleep and jolts of bad conscience. Comprised of fragments struggling to find a pulse, the work fails to achieve form. It will not gather or cohere. It cannot be satisfied.Peterson’s latest is the record of a book nearly aborted, as forlorn as a teddy bear in back of a stolen car, and best viewed as a cry from a rented room during the latest pandemic. Unearthed one day from layers of ash, it could prove to be as time sensitive as a doomsday document.Reader CommentsThese quarantine poems are parables about growing old and sick, while finding threads of hope in all leftover things...a teddy bear or the beads of a rosary.—Andy Vinca, student of Machado’sCompelling glimpses from inside the rabbit hole in which the poet awakens to a previous life and examines the missing pages that were omitted till he was ready to face them… Scraps of poems not made public but rather assembled by a family member or biographer as they disclose the man’s exit.—Rich Culbertson, Anglo-Saxon ChronicleDamn, he’s good! Any time I pick up his book I can open to any page and be restored to my senses.—Sharon Butler, artist