The Forgiveness Dream

I envy Lee Peterson’s restraint. The poems in The Forgiveness Dream are unadorned, image-driven, and exact; they stand like weight-bearing columns of marble. The opening sequence reimagines Antigone not as a distant classical figure but as a living presence, one that feels urgently contemporary. Through her, Peterson explores conviction, grief, loyalty, and the difficult ethics of resistance. Intellectually rigorous and deeply felt, these poems are as stark and lustrous as a strand of pearls against a bare neck.

—Alexandra Lytton Regalado, author of Matria and Relinquenda

Like the Greek myths themselves, Lee Peterson’s poems remain carefully and unbreakably stitched to our current historical moment, admitting when the truth is “a shell sound” echoing only outside our gates, and when the loss of a(ny) loved one is “a fault // of all our sins.” There is wisdom here, both intellectual and experiential, balanced by the poet’s courage to ask questions in the face of destruction and great love: “…what do we become? / No tongues to speak of, // to speak for, to know.” And what have we, the children of history, become? What do we risk everything to protect? How do we serve one another in the midst of so much death, so much injustice in the name of so-called power? These are the questions Peterson’s poems will stir in a reader—proceed with vulnerability and bravery!

—Abby Murray, author of Recovery Commands

How is it that the juxtaposition of beauty/brutality rings so horrific in its familiarity? Lee Peterson writes with such exquisite restraint, which is really the poetry of listening: “We cannot talk about refugees and not/talk about war or water.” As readers, we learn, we wonder: what is it we wake to in ourselves? What do we hold to ourselves that no one can know? The Forgiveness Dream stands with the nameless, joining rather than splitting—in the organic, breathing present.

—Jan Beatty, author of Dragstripping