In the first section of The Horse Who Bears Me Away, “The Fall,” an assortment of characters descend inwardly to the point of personal despair. In the second section, “Anywhere but Omaha,” they begin, with difficulty, to see more clearly who and what they are and to climb their way out of the nadir. In the final section, “Mutation,” the characters embark on a path to transformation—an awakening into a new way of seeing and existing in a world that is constantly testing the validity of their identities. This collection of poems, Peterson’s seventh, challenges readers to consciously embrace the dark side of their American psyche and to reach past it to a new way of being at peace with both the known and the unknown, which is called freedom.

ADVANCE PRAISE

Jim Peterson’s poems arise from that place where the world we know touches against the world we have always suspected might be there. In this place, we hear the wind “lisping her two or three words / of prolonged astonishment.” A dream becomes “the body of a forest.” I have been a follower of Jim Peterson’s work for almost four decades and have rarely read a poem of his that did not surprise me. The poems in The Horse Who Bears Me Away are no exception. In flights of lyric glory and narratives that gallop heedlessly forward, these poems offer the delight of “knowing who we are and who we’ll never be.” Here are new delights. Draw close and savor them.—Al Maginnes, author of The Next Place 

This is the work of a mature poet who has risen to new heights. There’s heartbreaking beauty in these words—and in the feelings and insights behind them. On page after page, Jim Peterson grabs the treacherous, turning world by the throat and forces out its secrets. If you want to know what poetry can do for the spirit, read this book. Then read it again, and be even more thankful.—Clint McCown, author of The Dictionary of Unspellable Noises

The poems in Jim Peterson’s The Horse Who Bears Me Away live and breathe within the world of flesh, through bodies that discover and rediscover themselves in strange and miraculous ways. Voices, too, animate these pages—the voices of laid-off laborers, hobos, crows, cougars, slash pines, wind “voicing its concern,” mockingbirds, lost and dying friends, and waitresses in places where “hands know their roles by heart.” From the stunning prologue, where the speaker merges with the body and spirit of a horse, to the epilogue, in which a dream strips him bare “as if fresh from creation,” Peterson invites us, his lucky readers, “to ease into these hands and feet, / pulling this body on like an old coat / that was made for you.”—Rebecca McClanahan, author of In the Key of New York City