Hook

The landscapes charted in Peter LaBerge's gorgeous chapbook are the fields and forests of desire, sensuous and frightening and wild. In poems equally attuned to pleasure and to fear, LaBerge seeks beauty in the wildness of nature and in the wild natures of our own bodies. But everywhere there is the threat of violence and decay: in the world after Matthew Shepard, in the harvest's cycle of life and death, in the unsatisfactory consolations of religion. "So easy," he writes in one poem, "for the beauty / to un-exist." -Richie Hofmann, author of Second Empire