Paulann Petersen

Paulann Petersen’s new poetry collection, One Small Sun (Salmon), takes readers from a fur shop in Oregon to a Hyderabadi shrine in India’s subcontinent. Its pages contain a meditation on postmortem photographs, an ode to the female earwig, an elegy for a grandmother’s panache. Tapping deeply into memory, relying on poetry’s ability to bring alive again what is coded into the blood, these poems ultimately form an arc of an aging woman’s life. This collection tells the tales of what she has always realized, is ever learning, but – only through poetry’s vehicle – can truly know.