Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the winner of two Carolyn Kizer Poetry Awards, Paulann Petersen has been on the faculty for the Creative Arts Community at Menucha, and has given workshops for Oregon Writers Workshop, Oregon State Poetry Association, and Mountain Writers Series. Madeline DeFrees says, "After the erotic poems of The Wild Awake, and the Turkish poems of Blood Silk, Paulann Petersen gives us [in] A BRIDE OF NARROW ESCAPE...stunning poems, intimate and deeply tender." And Lawson Inada says, "She ventures into the recesses of memory, explores the complexity of nature, and human nature...here is poetry of revelation and wonder." Oregon Literary Arts has chosen Paulann Peterson to receive The Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award for her work for the Friends of William Stafford. Paulann is also a finalist for the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry, a part of the 2006 Oregon Book Awards
Review
"The poems of this 'retrospective narrative' open with the final illness of the father, then that of the mother....From there, we move to the story of the author's growing up, as luck would have it, the only grandchild of a furrier. This places her in an environment rich in occasions and linguistic opportunities for poems. We follow the childhood and the teen years with their drama of sexual awakening into the final section where poems return to the late present and the ongoing romance of married love." Madeline DeFrees
Review
"A Bride of Narrow Escape is gorgeous, much like the mysterious migration of clouds moving over scarp and basin, between dream and reality, slowly rising, drifting like shades across inner and outer boundaries. This is a wonderful book, one of the very few I have read through, then immediately returned to the beginning and started again."
David Lee
Review
"The poems of Paulann Petersen brim with the brilliance of discovery. She ventures into the recesses of memory; she explores the complexity of nature and human nature; she brings forth the exquisite, lyrical yield. Hers is a poetry of revelation and wonder."
Lawson Inada
About the Author
Paulann Petersen is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University whose poems have appeared in many publications including Poetry, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, and Wilderness Magazine. She has three chapbooks (Under the Sign of a Neon Wolf, The Animal Bride, and Fabrication). Her first full-length collection of poems, The Wild Awake, was published by Confluence Press in 2002. A second, Blood-Silk, poems about Turkey, was published by Quiet Lion Press of Portland in 2004. Her work has been selected for Poetry Daily on the Internet, and for "Poetry in Motion", which puts poems on busses and light rail cars in the Portland metropolitan area. The winner of two Carolyn Kizer Awards, she has been on the faculty for the Creative Arts Community at Menucha, and has given workshops for Oregon Writers Workshop, Oregon State Poetry Association, and Mountain Writers Series. She serves on the board for Friends of William Stafford, organizing the annual January William Stafford Birthday Events.