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From one of Michigan’s foremost writers comes a powerful, soulful meditation on grief, loss, the natural world, and the relationship between humans and everything around us
In Peter Markus’s new collection of poems, the loss of the father has become the river that shapes the landscape that the speaker behind these poems is looking to navigate and explore. He finds fellowship and solace in the subject that drives many of these poems: birds, fish, and the ever-present river that runs through much of Markus’s work.
Continuing the emotional plumbing begun in his previous collection, When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds, Markus returns to the lower Detroit River and Pointe Mouillee, the geography of his grief, to explore a life remade as the water reshapes the shoreline, forever in motion.
“The river in Peter Markus’s poems does not explain anything. It flows, it repeats, it remembers. In that movement, grief finds its shape. These poems speak in a language so simple it becomes mysterious, so quiet it becomes unforgettable.”—Dunya Mikhail, author of Tablets: Secrets of the Clay
Peter Markus’s most recent book is the collection of poems When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds (Wayne State University Press, 2021) as well as the books of fiction Bob, or Man on Boat (2008), We Make Mud (2012), and The Fish and the Not Fish (2014), all published by Dzanc. He teaches fiction and poetry at Oakland University and is the Senior Writer with InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit.