Peter LaBerge (Poetry) | Philadelphia, PA

Peter LaBerge is the author of the chapbooks Makeshift Cathedral (YesYes Books, 2017) and Hook (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015), included on the American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow List and acquired by the U.S. Library of Congress. His work appears in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Crazyhorse, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Iowa Review, Pleiades, Tin House, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the Bucknell University Stadler Center for Poetry and the founder and editor-in-chief of The Adroit Journal. He lives in Philadelphia, where he is an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.

Chapbooks

Blurbs, Press & Reviews

An heir to both James Wright and Frank Bidart, Peter LaBerge writes seductive, austere psychologies, a “cathedral / of fields, cul-de-sacs, northwestern Ohio” in the background—and in the fore, “queerness unsolved.” I admire the discomfort of Makeshift Cathedral, the conflation of faith and the fragile body, of youth and sexual agency: “Pleasure—I never wanted this,” he admits in “Obey.” LaBerge shines a necessary light on cruelty and injustice, and yet. And yet, like hope, “the sky blooms in spite // of its return to night.” This is a disturbing, deeply humane book.
—Randall Mann

The landscapes charted in Peter LaBerge’s gorgeous chapbook are the fields and forests of desire, sensuous and frightening and wild. In poems equally attuned to pleasure and to fear, LaBerge seeks beauty in the wildness of nature and in the wild natures of our own bodies. But everywhere there is the threat of violence and decay: in the world after Matthew Shepard, in the harvest’s cycle of life and death, in the unsatisfactory consolations of religion. “So easy,” he writes in one poem, “for the beauty / to un-exist.”
—Richie Hofmann

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