Riding the Wheel: prose-poems (Kelsay Books; 2024)
Peter Anderson's dispatches from the western slope of the Sangre de Cristos appeared for many years in Colorado Central Magazine and the Crestone Eagle. Riding the Wheel gathers and distills many of those seasonal meditations into a lyrical almanac, which affirms and celebrates the great wheel of life.
The San Luis Valley of southern Colorado, Peter Anderson's home ground, is brought to life in this gathering of lyric essays, prose poems, and exquisite haikus. With him, we enjoy "creekside meditations on moving water," travel the "cosmic highway" on moonless nights where "distance has its way with you," outrun a wind-driven "man-eating dune," get to know the neighbors, both two-legged and four, in a "little town at the end of the road," and best of all celebrate the "good news" of a world that, despite these "precarious times," continually and forever renews itself.
—Rick Kempa, Editor/Publisher, Deep Wild Journal
Pete Anderson brings his own vernacular to the Japanese tradition of haibun, in which prose meets haiku and form is as prone to change as the seasons. Mystical and charming all at once, here we are given that rare alchemy of language and landscape, silence and sound, wilderness and wonder.
—Wendy Videlock, author of Wise to the West, poet laureate of Western Colorado
In Riding the Wheel, Anderson has crafted a paean to place, nature and living in the tradition of so many other fine writers—Barry Lopez comes to mind. To read a writer so in tune with nature, with rhythm, with the vicissitudes of life is to encounter the places, moments and prayers of Anderson's home as though we are there ourselves. We encounter not just the passing of seasons, not just a writer completely and skillfully in tune with their craft, but a tribute to life—and by life I mean love. The reader might not realize at first that they are witness to this love, but what leaps from the page lingers and haunts in the most reverberating and blessed ways.
—aaron a. abeyta, author of Colcha,
winner of the American Book Award