Conners, Peter: Beyond the Edge of Suffering: Prose Poems

White Pine Press, paperback

Publication Date: April 12, 2022

Publisher Marketing: Prose poems and flash fictions revealing the heart-wrenching, absurd, life-changing nature of living through Covid, political chaos, and personal upheaval.

Peter Conners’ unique blend of prose poetry, flash fiction, and other spare poetic forms pays witness to the heart-wrenching,absurd, life-changing nature of surviving a global pandemic during one of the most politically and culturally divisive times in American history. As a divorced father living in a blended family with 4 children, navigating a new marriage, and also caring for elderly parents, pandemic restrictions and their attendant scary weirdness hit hard. After a decade of publishing highly regarded nonfiction books about music and counterculture, Conners knew that only poetry could do these strange days justice. The result is Conners’ first prose poetry collection in a dozen years. Moving from raw personal poems like “One of you went” and “My father wanders” to overt political rants “The beaches are filled”and “Welcome to the last” to comically absurd flash fictions like “Superhero”and “Hello, my name is Larry” to meditations on relationships (“A small house;”“The old husband”) and spirituality (“If each martyr;” “Love everyone”),Conners strikes all the rich notes that illustrate our humanity, desire for love and connection, and striving for a rebirth that awaits just beyond the edge suffering.

“Part Tao, part surrealist dialogue, Peter Conners has penned a book of precise yet effusive runes from the well-gnawed bones of a man reflecting upon his family and nation at midlife. Here we have poet as citizen, philosopher, father, humorist, husband, we have the pandemic (in actuality and as metaphor), we have passing time, memory, ‘our whole dumb history,’ the theater of self with its ‘copious technical difficulties.’ These are minimalist and thin-trimmed parable-like stories, dialogues, and beautiful confessions that in the end haggle down the price we’ve paid through the last brutal years, encouraging the reader to take our problems and ‘Feed them to the squirrels. Those little fuckers will eat anything.’”
—Sean Thomas Dougherty