A National Book Critics Circle Award and Oregon Book Award Finalist "Like 'Brazil's undiscovered caverns of amethyst,' Allan Peterson's Fragile Acts is a major find." --John Ashbery " A wonder to behold and a joy to read. Allan Peterson's poems dance to the music of time, like light on water or wind in the trees." --Lewis Lapham "Allan Peterson's collection Fragile Acts is a spacewalk on the wild side. I loved it. He puts music to the tension between the desperate human experience and the cool removal of the cosmos. His poems are refreshingly discrete artifacts--perfected and edgy-raw at the same time. They stand alone but gain power in one another's presence.

This is an exciting new voice, one we've been waiting for." --Laura Kasischke "These poems rarely veer far from a well-defined reality that is often rooted in the natural world, fleabane, fish, fast clouds, osprey, and spider, but at the center of that world, and deeply embedded in it, is a thoughtful meditative speaker who both marvels at and raises insightful rhetorical questions about his place among so much mystery. His observing eye, as astute as the most finely-honed telephoto lens, is such that he¹s able to transform even the ordinary into something so exquisite it provokes wonder and awe." --Mary Jo Bang "[Allan Peterson's] work demands, and deserves, attention."-- Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) "Allan Peterson's meditations on domestic tranquility and ecocatastrophe are so smart that they could actually make you smarter" -- Boston Review "Though Peterson occasionally leads you like Wile E. Coyote into thin air, he is more likely to deliver you. He is a glissando in words."-- The Brooklyn Rail "Allan Peterson's Fragile Acts introduces us to a poet capable of changing from the personal and interior to the global and exterior in a single work, sometimes in a single line.

"--Shelf Awareness "Peterson is one of our most valuable poet-thinkers and thinker-poets, a writer who can show us how much is within our grasp and much is beyond it." -- LA Review of Books "Soul-poppingly magnetic."-- The Rumpus "A page-turner in the truest sense. "-- The Cossack Review "This is a book that belongs in your hands."-- Hey Small Press.