Confusion frames the human predicament. In Katie Peterson’s ‘Fog and Smoke’, confusion is, literally, our climate. Writing to and from the California landscape, Peterson sees fog and smoke as literal - one a habitual, natural weather event, the other an increasingly common after effect of the West’s drought-caused fires. But they are also metaphysical. Fog and smoke reflect the true conditions (and frustrations) of our ability to perceive and to connect. Peterson writes, “I’ve been speaking about it at a distance. / Now I want to talk about its thickness. / A person could get killed in here.”

ISBN: 9780374610890