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