Praise for the poetry of Joel Peckham

He possesses a stylistic grittiness, which can rise to high eloquence, and a profusion of fresh imagistic details, poem by persuasive poem, that is downright exciting—Robert Pack

Joel Peckham has written a survival guide to America. In poem after poem, each filled with an onslaught of hard knocks, hard asses, hard times, and hard edges to everything, we are all but hurled through the culture's overwhelming plurality of attacks on the heart.—Jack Ridl

Bone Music is a survival guide, a necessary book for our time and for time to come.--Wendy Barker

Peckham provides character studies as rich as any novelist's and all with a dark beauty illuminating the poems much like the brilliant sky holds in place Munch's horrific, yet mesmerizing scream.  These poems, too, will not let you go-- of that I'm sure --Marc Harshman

Praise for Any Moonwalker Can Tell You:

If the turns and involutions of syntax model, as I suspect they might, the complexity of a writer’s thinking, Joel Peckham’s Any Moonwalker Can Tell You unfolds for readers a mindfulness as agile as it is ambitious, an intelligence the music of which Peckham conducts with tremendous verve.  In both subject matter and style, these poems move, from Mongolian throat singing to collapsing stars to the sweat-panic of high-school dances, from wit to wonder, from finely wrought image to sure rhetorical statement.  Peckham’s work is also, to be sure, profoundly moving.  In poems of great urgency, and with an almost unfathomable depth of feeling, Peckham celebrates the tenacity of joy and the fierceness of love even in the face of ecological, existential, and familial extinctions.  Any Moonwalker Can Tell You resonates with the music of loss.  Like the finest of symphonies, it is bold and beautifully patterned.  It is awe-full, like a spacewalk.

Christopher Kempf, Author of What, Though the Field Be Lost, LSU.

"And it is a relief to know the world does not need us. That it might be better off, in fact." So sings Joel Peckham in the poem ‘The Locomotive of the Lord’, a meandering contemporary meditation that veers between modes of phenomenological thickness, grief for lost beloveds, grief for a decaying body, and ends with a repeated chant of being "thankful" for a life chugging away towards its inevitable end. But the grateful cynicism invoked by this poem gives us a rare voice: one who does not lack optimism in human living, but rather one possessing a more careful, measured relationship with it. In ‘Arrhythmia’ the same voice finds itself trilling, “and maybe the best that we // can say is yesterday I heard this cry and I thought of my son, and it was like and it was like and it was like and it was like and it was like and it was like and it was like and it was…” 

Here is a poet, who through great suffering and even greater integrity writes music whose desperate honesty does not mar the depth of its lyrical expression, but thoroughly and truly earns it. If there is any integrity in American literary criticism, these later poems—which are somehow both starkly, distantly observant and relentlessly self-regarding—will outlive the present age. To put it succinctly: Peckham writes with a uniquely rugged dignity, and refashions the insights of Modernist poetry into a voice that is distinctively, idiosyncratically his own.

Tawanda Mulalu, Author of Please Make Me Pretty, I Don’t Want to Die, Princeton UP.