Life in a Field: Poems - Paperback

by Katie Peterson (Author), Young Suh (Photographer)

This is a comedy about climate change, in which a girl and a donkey become friends, then decide to marry time.

A lyric fable, Life in a Field intersperses Katie Peterson's slow-moving, cinematic, and sensual writing with three folios of photographs by Young Suh. Introspection, wish, dream, and memory mark this tale, which is set in a location resembling twenty-first-century California--with vistas and orchards threatened by drought and fires. This is also a place of enchantment, a fairy-tale landscape where humans and animals live as equals. As the girl and the donkey grow up, they respond to the difficulties of contemporary civilization, asking a question that meets our existential moment: What do you do with the story you didn't wish for? A narrator's voice combines candor with distance, attempting to find a path through our familiar strife, toward a future that feels all but impossible, and into what remains of beauty and pleasure. Life in a Field tries to reverse our accelerating destruction of the natural world, reminding us of "the cold clarity we need to continue on this earth."

Author Biography

Katie Peterson is the author of four previous collections of poetry, including A Piece of Good News. Her poetry has been published in the Journal of Alta California, Literary Imagination, and Poetry Northwest, among others. She is professor and Chancellor's Fellow at the University of California, Davis, where she directs the MFA program in creative writing. She lives in Berkeley with her husband and their daughter. Young Suh is a photographer and associate professor at the University of California, Davis.