Fog and Smoke: Poems

Katie Peterson unfurls the quotidian fabric of our lives, patterned with the difficulties of language and this moment.

Confusion frames the human predicament. In Katie Peterson’s Fog and Smoke, confusion is, literally, our climate. Writing to and from the California landscape, Peterson sees fog and smoke as literal—one a habitual, natural weather event, the other an increasingly common aftereffect of the West’s drought-caused fires. But they are also metaphysical. Fog and smoke reflect the t...