Monday, March 29, 2010

Now Available! Museum of Thrown Objects by Andrew K. Peterson

Greetings Friend, Happy Spring and All!
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I'm excited to share this announcement with you for the release of my first full-length book of poems, Museum of Thrown Objects, just published by BlazeVox Books (Buffalo, 2010). The cover (above) features beautiful artwork by Atlanta-based artist Dayna Thacker.
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Here’s what some beloved readers are saying about the book!
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Andy Peterson's poetry combines visual art, both his own and some found elsewhere in the universe, with words redolent of mystery, thrillers, clues and riddles, and does so in a far more intelligent and sustaining way than present popular literature -- while not adopting any sense of "superiority" to same. Museum of Thrown Objects is a terrific "read" and a likewise "look" as well. -- Anselm Hollo, Guy Fawkes Day 2009
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Imagine an ocean leaving its bed to hover above itself, where it should not be, to form a "silhouette" visible against an "afternoon." The technology of displacement is deployed, in Andrew Peterson's brilliant book, to create: not "delay" but "fusion." It makes sense, then, to build a museum out of artifacts that would, in the wetness beyond architecture, disappear by "low tide", but are instead "kept." Locked away in a decaying archive, "the thrown objects" form perverse alliances when the lights dim. Where the genitalia should be, for example, are "leafs and bugs." Intra-species, foaming, future-soaked, and with a "metallic corsage" delicately sewn to the wrist, the figures in Peterson's poems come to get you. And they do. They get you and take you somewhere until: "we are all here together in our new place." -- Bhanu Kapil
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Museum of Thrown Objects exists as a poetic architectural phenomenon. Peterson constructs a kaleidoscopic wunderkammer of lyric, vispo, and conceptual experiments. Reading/Performing through its various wings I am activated into an environment of idiosyncratic relations. Things/Objects/Words have a collaged and artificial sensibility; as if Peterson is laughing at the overbearing seriousness of our contemporary museums with some incredulous anarchistic cut & paste. The difference between encasing an artwork behind glass as a stale and defined representation of some imagined mastery and staging things/objects/words in a dynamic and active performance of potentiality. This museum is enacting a perception embedded in things as much as in ourselves and, to me most importantly, things and selves in relationship to each other. Peterson, and the reader emerge throughout as poet-collectors (curators) in the process of mapping and performing transformation and relationship. Museum of Thrown Objects instructs the reader/performer: "Do not deny you are the work of art.". And so doing provides as it performs a dialogic and critical ethics of reading. We experience Peterson experiencing and thus find our own museums everywhere. -- Jared Hayes

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I’ll say: been a joy building/cutting/pasting/curating this 'liquid architecture' from myriad found things of memory & place: errant ink petals, torn comic strips, flaky wallpaper, extinct flightless birds, rocks shaped like extinct flightless birds, transformed instruction manuals & diagrams, dream music, talking monuments & furniture, Oulipian place-mats, unsent love letters, puzzle pieces shaped like Idaho, ransom notes for missing bathroom materials, faded family photographs, errata, & other language/objects found & lost along-between there & here (from Boulder-Missoula-Arizona-desert-along-Massachusetts-coast-to-wherever-you-are...)

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Ordering info: You can purchase from me directly for $12 (which is below publisher's price & includes shipping!) by visiting my blog, www.songfromyourhometown.blogspot.com, then
clicking on the PayPal “Buy Now” button on the right-hand side. (If you’d rather not order through PayPal, please feel free to send a check to me: Andrew Peterson, PO Box 532, Marshfield Hills, MA 02051). Or, I heartily encourage you to purchase by visiting BlazeVox's website, here. Oh, & trades are great, too! (E-mail me!)
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Thank you so much for all your love, friendship, support, & inspiration. Hope to see you soon!
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Love, Andy

3 comments:

akp said...

Anyone feel like doing this?

-akp

celestual said...

congrats andy! i'll be popping over to buy the book :)

jcooper said...

CARLSON!!!