False-Positive: the Quarantine Verses

A Book At War With Itself

I had completed my earlier book, dotted the i’s and licked the stamps, and then…
SOMETHING HAPPENED
and there was nothing more to say.
—geoff peterson

False-Positive is an author’s kiss of death. Beginning in the silence that precedes thought, it slips between sleep and jolts of bad conscience. Comprised of fragments struggling to find a pulse, the work fails to achieve form. It will not gather or cohere. It cannot be satisfied.

Peterson’s latest is the record of a book nearly aborted, as forlorn as a teddy bear in back of a stolen car, and best viewed as a cry from a rented room during the latest pandemic. Unearthed one day from layers of ash, it could prove to be as time sensitive as a doomsday document.

Reader Comments

These quarantine poems are parables about growing old and sick, while finding threads of hope in all leftover things...a teddy bear or the beads of a rosary.
—Andy Vinca, student of Machado’s

Compelling glimpses from inside the rabbit hole in which the poet awakens to a previous life and examines the missing pages that were omitted till he was ready to face them… Scraps of poems not made public but rather assembled by a family member or biographer as they disclose the man’s exit.
—Rich Culbertson, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Damn, he’s good! Any time I pick up his book I can open to any page and be restored to my senses.
—Sharon Butler, artist