Black Birds

Poetry. In BLACK BIRDS: BLUE HORSE, Natalie Peeterse explores grief and loss. The chapbook is dedicated to Nicole Dial, a woman who died in Afghanistan. The reader experiences the poet's loss of her friend a loss she is reminded of in nearly everything, and charts in others who knew Dial. "Natalie Peeterse's BLACK BIRDS: BLUE HORSE is remarkable for its urgency and power. This precisely envisioned elegiac sequence is both intimate and public, reckoning its speaker's passage through both the urban landscape of Washington, D.C. and the distant wartime nightmare of Afghanistan. We live in an age that is corrosive in its details, and this superb chapbook reminds us of the raw weather we all now live within and of the ways the world, at times, can simply collapse upon us." David St. John"