In this thoughtful collection of narratives, author Joel Peckham explores the transformative power of emotional and physical pain from the vantage point of a husband and parent who lost his wife and a child in an accident thatleft him in chronic distress. Along the way, he ﬁlls a need for a brutally honest literary examination of not only grief and suffering, but also of recovery. There are no heroes in these pages, and the author has consciously resisted the mythmaking impulse--that desire to honor the dead and to give tragedy purpose by telling a sad but inspirational story. Instead, the book does a great deal to counter our assumptions about grief and suffering-- assumptions that do damage both to those in pain and those who try to comfort them.

Resisting Elegy: On Grief and Recovery

Peckham, Joel

Parenting & Relationships

Academy Chicago Publishers

Literary Nonfiction. "Joel Peckham's writing is essential reading for me. He's a contemporary whose work I need to read to understand the world I live in. His first collection, RESISTING ELEGY, hit me as a revelation because of its intimacy, its depth, and its unflinching honesty—not only with the reader, but with himself. There are very few people in the world willing to take such a terrifying journey into the essence of their own lives and far, far fewer with the skills to take us along with them. Peckham is one of those people and his voice guides us through a darkness we'd be too afraid to explore alone. And then there is the writing. Peckham's exquisite language does what writing is supposed to do—envelope you in a new universe and take you on a dramatic and emotional journey. His new collection, BODY MEMORY, continues what is now his hallmark: It explores the deeply personal and hard-to- articulate understandings of what it means to both have a body and also be one. His fears, his phobias, his frailties are all on display so we can better understand ourselves and what it means to be alive—and to be grateful to be alive—today."—Derek B. Miller

Body Memory

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

New Rivers Press

"There's something about ecstasy that scares us. It scares me. Perhaps it is the fear of losing control, or the fear that maybe we never really are in control, that all the learning, and reading, and studying in the world can't lead us any closer to wisdom or to God. That there is something we are missing, that exists at the corners of the eyes, that is right there, but sneaks up from behind as we reach for it, then overwhelms us like a wave. We crave it and fear it. The ecstatic is not something we can control or construct or will into being; it comes from wilder places and speaks to and from and out of chaos: the irrational, the intuitive--the LSD experiments of the '60s, the raves of the '90s. It is the burning bush. It is the passion. For me it was a night in Jordan in a hospital after waking up to find out that I had been in a car accident and lost my oldest child and my wife, Susan. My hip was shattered. I was sweating with pain and morphine and grief and I screamed and writhed in it, never more fully in a moment my entire life, never more at the mercy of the world--so in my body and yet so beyond it."--Joel Peckham, from the Introduction 
"Ecstasy, joy, the deep grief and surprise of being alive and losing the ones we love, the electromagnetic tug of the earth (the scientist Gregg Braden says our hearts are electrically 100 times stronger than our brains and magnetically over 5,000 times stronger), laughter so deep and full it scrapes away at our ribs, dancing all night at a writer's party, catching a 20" brown trout in a Michigan stream in the dead of winter, holding hands for the first time with the one who will become our life partner, a 1,000 ways to kiss the ground, as Rumi once said in a poem (the original said 100 ways to kiss the ground, but I keep adding a few more ways--I hope and trust Rumi wouldn't mind). My own profoundly limited sense of the ecstatic is that nothing can prepare you for it except profound openness itself, which is not the usual way people seem to operate in the West or anywhere else for that matter. Most of us hide behind roles, test the winds of fashion and popularity, worship at what Marcus Borg calls the three primary idols--Affluence, Achievement, Appearance. But ecstatic experience doesn't seem to have time for these--any happy child can teach us this as we watch her build a sandcastle on the shores of Lake Michigan."--Robert Vivian, from the Introduction 
Poetry. Edited by Robert Vivian.

Wild Gods

Any Moonwalker Can Tell You: New and Selected Poems

Poetry

Stephen F. Austin University Press

Joel Peckham's Bone Music does many things so well:&nbsp; it invokes the blue tones and rhythms of Charlie Parker, and the improvisations suggested by "Prologue" move the music and rhythms, "layering one upon another," throughout the book.&nbsp; But, the poet is the musician, the horn blower, who must ever be "Waiting.&nbsp; Wondering where the next beat would come, if it would come . . . a pulse, a roll to bring him back into the song completely new."&nbsp; This sets the stage for the concert of prose poems that follow, and in Bone Music the reader will find the best book of prose poems since Karl Shapiro's The Bourgeois Poet from the 1960s.&nbsp; In "The Wreckage That We Travel In," he writes, "The world must take us by surprise," and, indeed, we are given the details, as if they were notes played, of surprise.&nbsp; If it's not the wreckage of automobiles, it may be the wreckage of lives and what to do with them.&nbsp;Bone Music takes us through such interludes and more. As Peckham writes in "Arrhythmia," this is "what listening means," the music "finding in the storm, the harmony, the single tap of rain among the many rhythms, the molecule of silence beating like a heart."

Bone Music

"It is no small thing, this casting," Joel Peckham writes of fishing, but it might be any action described in this book. Whether these characters and speakers are shoveling asphalt, trying and failing to pop a wheelie, or engaged in contentious flirtation, they are fully aware both of their unredeemed bodies and the horizons the spirit senses but can only aspire to. In long, sinewy lines or flowing prose poems, Peckham casts a loving but unsentimental gaze over his subjects. Here is a poet who writes with the eye of a seer, one whose lines arouse the lyric fury available only to those poets who have thoroughly mastered their craft

MUCH

UnCollected Press

“A Chevy up on blocks is only an eyesoreto the faithless.”—from “Husks”In GOD’S BICYCLE, Joel Peckham’s fifth collection of poetry, he offers a spiritual road mix for 21st-century America. In poems that travel from the heartland through Appalachia to New England, he sings a song crafted from his own strange brew of off-kilter, irreverent psalms, prayers, hymns, aubades, and elegies in praise and homage to a fragmented but beautiful landscape and people. Drawing as much from rockabilly as Whitman, these poems are always intense and often exuberant, even in their struggle for the kind of hope that can “rise green and leafy from a bitter soil.”

God's Bicycle

FutureCycle Press

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Books by Peckham, Joel