
Fog and Smoke by Katie Peterson Review by Marina Kraiskaya
Fog and Smoke by Katie Peterson
Review by Marina Kraiskaya
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: January 2, 2024
ISBN: 0374610894
Pages: 96
We Are Alive Together: On Fog and Smoke by Katie Peterson
In her conversational and precise sixth collection, poet Katie Peterson puts off associations of romanticism and mystique to examine fog and smoke as physical and metaphysical bodies in conversation with the poetic voice and with humanity.
Fog and Smoke is tender toward family, community, and the world as it brings daily scenes, imagined voices, and the aftereffects of tragedy into its fold. Themes merge to showcase the poet’s sagacity, covert humor, and rootedness—as the natural world is never too far away, half-visible in the haze. Peterson keeps a subtle eye on her reader as she lifts truths from poetic moments, especially in the context of relationships, with candid lines like these in the poem “The Walk to the Road, When Dinner Was Over”:
I walk alongside the barbed wire, grateful
for what I can’t control,
the alignment of your thoughts
with mine. It’s delicate.
And in another poem, with a questioning of the quotidian symbolic in “The Supermoon”:
There’s no place for chopsticks
in an American drawer, my husband said.
I said, just try me. Just watch me try.
I’m American. I can put things anywhere.
Fog and Smoke constitutes three parts. The first poem is a slow emergence of meditations on the San Francisco Bay Area’s notorious fog as a force and a state of change, a “highway paving itself.” The fog shapeshifts between metaphors, from contagion to deadly realm to movie director to shroud—“anything / with duration that acts permanent” (“Fog”). Fog and smoke function as variables or spirits of their larger force (ocean, fire). Meanwhile, the speaker introduces herself as citizen, participant, and observer before slipping later into the interiority of specifics: life as a partner, mother, American, animal.
Peterson once referred to her writing as “a combination between a classic American nature poet and a sexy metaphysical like John Donne” (Writer Mother Monster podcast). With Fog and Smoke, Peterson is helping to shape Californian ecopoetics. She locates us at the sea, in the field and farm, in the desert, and with the forests and their fires. Without bitterness, blame, melancholy, or even drama, yet always taking a stand, her poems are wise in their consciousness of collective Californian and national trauma.
Peterson is also a poet of subtle and continuous turns. The natural world and environmental damage enter her poems not unlike how they coexist with us in daily life. In “Fog”:
[…] Like money, power flows
to the people. When it leaves us, we riot.
Riot of droplets, organized
by expulsion. What can’t be seen
clings to dust like a scholar
once said the soul did.
Fog’s not the only body
stays numinous all its life.
It takes a master to employ broad vocabulary with dexterity, and Peterson’s images allow the reader to circle them and rest within their deceptively accessible statements. Some of my favorites are the opening lines of “The Fire Map”:
Their symbols are single flames. Every fire
requires a pretty name—Apple, Blue Jay, Coyote.
they earned those names by starting where they did.
And you can find them if you pause the arrow
on the map, and press with your finger, but not too hard.
And we do pause—at the ancient symbol; at the forcible and violent yet beautiful and inventive human act of shooting an arrow or stoking a fire. At the name of each small, scarred West Coast community.
Peterson’s work is straightforward and intimate, but also evocative in the far-reaching possibilities of large metaphors. Similes crop up rarely, but beautifully, as with this one in “The Teacher and the Student”:
The scene could live like iron in the earth.
Hard in the senses, liquid underneath.
Her poems are effortless on a first read and chasmic on a second. They balance starkness, a calculating conceit, deep feeling, and natural image while not shutting out warmer rhetoric, naming, and humor the way some of her early poems may have done. There is also an interesting, recurring, conclusive philosophy on the nature of questioning as a method of learning and living in lines like “show me a question that doesn’t eat its answer” (“The Country”).
Despite the fog and smoke, Peterson’s language is clear. The speaker remains aware of their own rumination on the self, the other, and society, performing restrained analysis without cynicism. Poems’ conclusions often include a continuance or verb, whether it be traffic pushing forward, people getting married, fire burning, or sea levels rising. No matter the topic, the poems cut through the superfluous to favor transitory movement, a fluid gaze, and fidelity to a grounded life. In the choice to see, to squint at something, there is wonder, dismay, decisiveness, fragile beauty, and symbolism. “The Web” is an appropriately delicate and brief marvel:
Never seen a whole
one until now–
not one broken
line, connections
flawless. Unfrayed.
[…]
only by the maker
can her web be seen,
her body just
as visible, her health
thrown into relief
by her invisible
work. […]
Poems speak to each other softly, with many suggesting how the speaker’s relation to wilderness, definition of family, and concept of motherhood have shifted and evolved while raising a child. “The Night” progresses this theme of the personal transcending into the public:
We all study the sunset,
we look and tell each other to look.
[…]
No one knows when the night begins.
There must be a moment, no
one has learned it yet, even the baby
knows that it exists […]
The racoon mothers have never asked.
Night persists in the noses of the deer.
Contrasting an animal sense of knowing with the intuitions of a parent and child relationship, Peterson continues to slowly, transcendentally bleed the personal into the public. The knowledge we gain is anchored as much by her speaker’s forthright questions or assertions of not-knowing (when night begins) as much as it is by existential fear (of pandemics, natural disaster, death). In “Smoke,” mothers decide whether the air outdoors is safe enough for children. The city issues an ordinance on recreational fires as parents comment
on events of the day, opinions.
Children belong in school.
People cannot agree on that
The natural world, meanwhile, finds its way in as an additional pillar upon which perception can stand. As a daughter learns to read, for example, the poem explores language association and what juxtaposed human objects the sea conceals (warships, jewels) as waters rise. This concept returns in the tender, end-stopped poem “The Beach,” which reminds us of humanity’s origins and fears, ending at: “Fire is a resource that can’t be saved.” This image of a fire — ignited by a child in a cave — burns as beautifully, briefly, and dangerously as any life.
“You’d have to talk to someone,” Peterson writes in “The Fire Map,” “who lived through those fires to find out what burned. / In no year does this map record our smoke.” The poet succeeds in tackling impossible topics like climate change or a pandemic without immediately dating the poem or becoming polemical. She accomplishes this in part by not naming each event, and by embodying the citizen’s perspective: the individual and the collective, acknowledging the limits of both. She foretells that we “must be slow in advance / of what’s coming” (“The Interior”) and knows that we have no choice but to keep on with our small stories in the sand — to be “alive together,” (“The Country”) feeling our way through.
Katie Peterson’s most recent book is Fog and Smoke. Her previous poetry collection, Life in a Field (2021) is a collaboration with the photographer Young Suh. She is the author of other books: This One Tree (New Issues, 2006), Permission (New Issues, 2013), The Accounts (University of Chicago, 2013), and A Piece of Good News (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019), a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in 2020. She is the editor of the New Selected Poems of Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017). Her work has been recognized with awards and fellowships, including the Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas for The Accounts, a Literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is the Director of the MFA Program at the University of California at Davis, where she is also a Chancellor’s Fellow. She is an Associate Editor for the Phoenix Poets Series at the University of Chicago Press.
Marina Kraiskaya is a Ukrainian-American writer and editor of the journal Bicoastal Review. In 2024, she won the Markham Prize, won The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction, placed second in the Joy Bale Boone Prize, and was a finalist in the Mississippi Review and Driftwood poetry prizes. mkraiskaya.com
9 October 2024
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