Jessi Peterson
Judge’s Comments:
Century Farm by Jessi Peterson. There are many poems about the countryside, but most seem written by people who view the landscape from their deck chairs. Peterson's book, meditating on the "cut-over farm" she lives on with her husband, sees beyond the pastoral view into the grit of the land. The poet revels in the roadside flowers--the "white tower of pokeberry" and "candelabra of vervain"--she knows the land's history, evoking the Swedes and Poles "beating back the wild," their "draft horses lunging wetly/into their harnesses," and she has a keen sense of the weather, noting "the wind tastes tinny here on the edge of November." She describes well the sense of a countryside half-abandoned but full of business, where "tweedy wild turkeys are left to struggle up the drive,/panning for the gold nobody planted."
