The Book of Light Poetry Series and Books Inc. Alameda present Katie Peterson and Alisha Dietzman for a reading and signing of their incredible collections Fog and Smoke and Sweet Movie!
FOG & SMOKE
Peterson unfurls the quotidian fabric of our lives, patterned with the difficulties of language and this moment.
Confusion frames the human predicament. In Katie Peterson’s Fog and Smoke, confusion is, literally, our climate. Writing to, and from, the California landscape, Peterson sees fog and smoke as literal—one a natural weather event, the other an aftereffect of the West’s drought-caused fires—but they are also metaphysical. Fog and smoke subsume the poet and reflect the true conditions (and frustrations) of our ability to perceive and to connect. She writes, “I’ve been speaking about it at a distance. / Now I want to talk about its thickness. / A person could get killed in here.”
The collection moves through three sections: First, the poet follows her local fog’s cyclical journey of descent and dispersion; second, in a sort of pastoral interlude, she travels widely, almost erratically, to the California desert, the greater world, and ancient history; finally, she descends into the enclosed space of the household, and the increased confinement and intimacy of raising a child during the pandemic. Peterson unfolds the small moments that make up our lives and reveals the truths contained within them, and her poems capture the lyricism of our daily rhythms—the interruptions, dialogues, and epiphanies.
“Peterson’s prickly, playful book is filled with quasi parables . . . Poetry is always about what’s being said and not said, but rarely are the two so expertly intertwined.” —David Orr, The New York Times Book Review
Katie Peterson is the author of the poetry collections This One Tree; Permission; The Accounts, winner of the Rilke Prize; and A Piece of Good News. She lives in California and teaches at the University of California, Davis.
SWEET MOVIE
A National Poetry Series winner selected by Victoria Chang, Sweet Movie confronts romantic and religious masochism to interrogate spiritual, sexual, and moral agency
Sweet Movie’s love poems and ekphrasis echo splintered versions of the same question: how do we navigate a world where the expectations of our performance—our presentation, our means of existence—are dictated by the viewers themselves?
Mirroring the uncertain, unstable tenor of Dušan Makavejev’s controversial avant-garde film Sweet Movie (1974), the voices in Sweet Movie are equal parts docile, feverish, and violent. This collection reimagines a feminist approach to religious masochism to explore the ways women are denied agency by both their faith communities and by outsiders.
Dietzman’s poems move through locations across Central Europe and the American South. Each new landscape informs the next: Memphis appears in Berlin in the form of a dead deer, and Southern syntax haunts an elegy for Gustavs Klucis.
The inspired poems from Sweet Movie use film and art to break open seeing. What results are deeply insightful and spacious poems of faith, displacement, and love. Perpetually observant, Sweet Movie guardedly but desperately consumes a world that has become unsettling and uncertain.
“A rich and thought-provoking collection. Poetry lovers and Dietzman fans will want to read these poems over and over again and can find something new to enjoy or admire each time.”
—Library Journal, Starred Review
“The poems in Sweet Movie are wrought with beauty and being in the world.”
—Victoria Chang, from the foreword
“‘I didn’t expect the desert, its longform,’ writes Alisha Dietzman in her lustrous debut Sweet Movie, a collection centered around ekphrasis. TV, movies, the self, even art and religion, serve as mediums on which the speaker casts the light of consciousness in her search for meaning.”
—Quan Barry, author of Auction: Poems
“A taut and haunting book of love and faith when all around us hate and nihilism crowd in.”
—Philip Metres, author of Shrapnel Maps
“Alisha Dietzman is a love poet for the twenty-first century, a fierce, devoted sensualist who feeds on aesthetic experience. . . . Sweet Movie [is] a book on the run—from men, from religion, from family, from legacies of violence against women—and it wants you along for the ride. And it’s thrilling.”
—Katie Peterson, author of Life in a Field: Poems
Alisha Dietzman is the author of Sweet Movie (Beacon, 2023), selected by Victoria Chang for the 2022 National Poetry Series, and shortlisted for the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize in 2024. Her chapbook, Slow Motion Something For No Reason (Factory Hollow Press, 2022), was the editors’ choice selection for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Her poetry has appeared in or will appear in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, T
