Allan Peterson’s Fragile Acts reviewed

Stephen Burt reviews Allan Peterson’s Fragile Acts for The Volta.

A poet must be smart enough and patient enough—syntax supple enough, terms subtle enough—to make the lines and sentences in the poem reflect all the cross-pressures and refractions by which the object turns into a fleeting mental construction, and that construction into what we remember and know.

It can be done, though. Right now it’s being done—