An exciting announcement from one of our own English Ph.D. students—in addition to the pre-release of his chapbook celestial navigation, Peter Vanderberg’s first full-length poetry manuscript, Drownproof, has just been released by Black Centipede Press—a very young (but growing!) independent press in Colorado.
Kimiko hahn, author of Foreign Bodies, offers the following review of Drownproof:
“I think to myself, Aren’t we beginning with a flawed supposition, that one can be drownproof, since it is living things that drown and not, say, boats? I think, why this title? Which is to say, I am immediately engaged in a curious venture into the pages of Peter Vanderberg’s debut collection. But first, the dictionary: drownproof is a method of surviving in water in disaster scenarios. Now what? Whether an intimate relationship with Commander Beaufort’s wind force scale with its elegant terminology (glassy crests, wavelets, spindrift); whether the infant in utero impressed by spare elegiac Japanese poetics; whether the poet’s own Navy experiences — these poems explore life and loss, living and the threat of war, as personal events. The combined sequences pull the reader in and out of time, into an experience that is against chronology and, in drawing us into what becomes a book-length poem, into a charged poetic voyage towards survival.”
The manuscript can be purchased here on Black Centipede Press’s website for $16.00.
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