Lovely, astute and beautifully crafted poems—and something . . . ineffably both
hopeful and resigned here. Some tone or style one doesn’t see much of . . . an
original.
—Daniel Lawless
In “Visiting My Parents’ Grave,” one of the chilling/hilarious poems in Joyce
Peseroff’s Petition, the poet clutches her seatbelt as her Aunt Rita hits the throttle,
“cuts across lanes of traffic,” and “can’t get out of / the cemetery fast enough.”
The poems here, both personal and political, often begin in the valley of the
shadow, but Peseroff’s writing—electric, cheeky, surprising at every twist and
turn, and deeply affecting—like her unstoppable aunt, gleefully propels us out of
the darkness and back into the living daylight.
—Lloyd Schwartz
The poems in Petition recognize how helpless we are in our desire to repair the
world. Lyrical, and often subversively witty, they’re built, as Thoreau would have
it, “of native stuff.” The pitch-perfect title poem, “Petition, “demands with tenderness
and irony (how can a poem’s “petition” actually make anything happen?):
“. . . Give ripeness to a time. / Give us time to restore the forests and the sea/we
filtered of whales, codfish, and pink dolphins. / Give us eternity again, we’ll set
things right.” Tough, heartbroken, never self-exonerating, and going for broke,
Peseroff brings everything she’s got to her intimate lyrical songs. Petition wrestles,
as we must, with the moral and emotional challenges of life—and love—in the
21st century, for “The road is mud, but it’s still a road.” (“Thaw”)
—Gail Mazur