Description
Peter Conners is founding co-editor of Double Room: A Journal of Prose Poetry & Flash Fiction. He also edited PP/FF: An Anthology which was published by Starcherone Books in 2006. Poems from Of Whiskey and Winter have appeared in various journals including Mississippi Review, Mid-American Review, Sentence, Salt Hill, and Drunken Boat, as well as in the anthologies Sudden Stories, 100 Contemporary Prose Poems, and An Introduction to the Prose Poem. Peter lives in Rochester, NY with his wife and two children. He works as Editor and oversees marketing for BOA Editions. His web site is: www.peterconners.com.
Reviews

“Peter Conner’s poems in “Of Whiskey and Winter” have a wonderful way of communicating strangeness, displacement, through precise yet unorthodox choice and placing of words within each poem. His poems often have a remarkable stillness to them, giving the reader time to look around once inside their world, and really breathe the poems in. He has a way in finding beauty in struggle, and at the same time celebrating being in the moment, whether in trying to survive a northern winter, or coming to terms with our own mortality. In “Certified Alive” he combines the two, and writes of a year’s passing “each spring I emerge thicker with bear weight. My hair grows, my waist, my growl a truer lament.” Here, as elsewhere in “Of Whiskey and Winter,” he writes of our direct, oft-unrealized connection to the natural world, to being something that like everything else we come in contact with, is terribly impermanent. And he approaches it all with a sense of wonder, of delight. This is reflected both in his language, with its lovely mis-directions, questions becoming answers and then turning back on themselves, and even in celebrating the clarity of madness, of absolutely not having yourself grounded, prepared for what’s next. Peter has a way of placing us immediately in the moment, and then being perfectly willing to disorient us, to explode the familiar, to use the strangeness and odd juxtapositions within these poems to alter our sense of where we are. “Of Whiskey and Winter” grapples with the distance between our reach--our dreams--and our grasp--our hard realities. Like the title of the poem “The Thing Behind the Other Thing,” Peter’s poems invite us to look a little deeper, consider a little more, identify that which is not readily apparent, but requires our utmost involvement. Both is these poems, and in our lives.”

-Glenn Raucher - The Writer’s Voice - New York City

"For a book of prose poetry, Conner's Of Whiskey & Winter is amazingly lithe, almost nimble. Peter Conners has offered a wonderful cycle and proof, for those of us who may need it, that prose poetry requires no more validation: it has arrived."

-Weston Cutter - Mid American Review

“Peter Conners' stunning prose poems are packed with keen sensitivity, dreaminess, and wit. I love his time travels, the vibrant layering of image and detail. Try taking walks as you are reading this book— the dazzle of landscapes, inner and outer, feel replenished and rich. This is language and vision I want to come home to again and again.”

—Naomi Shihab Nye 

 

“I don’t know what’s more remarkable about the poems in Of Whiskey and Winter, their exquisite music or their startling, acrobatic leaps. In these new poems Peter Conners peels away the fragile membrane that separates imagination from reality, the suppositional from the actual. Lyrical, intelligent and passionate, Conners writes with the suppleness and the grace of a dancer. By turns manic and contemplative, zany and wise, his rollicking poems have the power to simultaneously challenge, illuminate and praise the illusive character of the world. With a blend of irony and affection typical of this collection, Conners insists that “if we are to dream ourselves away, let us dream of this . . .”

—Gary Young

“This book is not a party favor. Not a fairy tale. It is not an escape from life or an alternative to reality. It is, alas, a map of the mind, of its winter landscapes, of the psyche of fatherhood, of marriage, and of the daily drudgery of life. How odd that it is also comic, surprising, magical, even illuminating. I am both enchanted and baffled by this poet. What a completely unique voice, what a bold new collection.”

—Nin Andrews

Accolades