Book
Peter Krumbach’s debut collection, Degrees of Romance, was selected as the winner of the Elixir Press 2022 Antivenom Poetry Award.
Contest judge, Candice Reffe describes the book:
These dazzling prose poems are a portal into “a realm where some great secret is to be divulged, the gate to what’s been sought but never found briefly ajar.” Enter.Details of ordinary life—the scraping of a spoon, the “fat blue mailbox bolted to a sidewalk”—shimmer like auras the poet reads in the world around us. Part observation, part divination, the poems send messages in invisible ink that appear when you tip them to the sun, the dispatch you’ve been waiting for.
Degrees of Romance constructs a world from a cool and fevered strangeness, from the collision of language that breaks the boundary between the seen and unseen, from a dense and alluring music—one suspects the poet has found the original divine composition that sang us into being, a song all creatures, the living, the dead, the unborn, are attuned to. A world where even in contradiction we exist in harmony.
One thing transforms into another, kaleidoscopic, a profound act of alchemy animated by animals—grackles, fruit flies, elephants—by humans—grocers, government agents, critics and composers, a flatulent philosopher. They’re funny. They pull the unexpected out of a hat shaped like a prose poem that contains multitudes, that travels the space time continuum, so we might “grasp” our “impermanence,” “the unweighable bliss of a leaf in an updraft,” the day with its “preposterous charm.” Like a “pheromoned trail” left by the bellies of ants these poems leave a scent that guides us, fugitives finding our way to each other, to the light that binds us to this world, the lucky ones who mold “confusion into awe.”
Praise for Dagrees of Romance
Peter Krumbach’s Degrees of Romance is a dark romp through the surreal spaces of the everyday. In these brief prose poems, hauntingly funny in the manner of Russell Edson, Charles Simic, and Zachary Schomburg, the “woman on the park bench opens her husband’s head” to find “another head inside”; a bear “went door to door on his hind legs and asked for romance”; and breaths are carefully counted into the hundreds of millions. These antics serve to guard—and simultaneously, somehow, illuminate—“a realm where some great secret is to be divulged.” Once inside, you won’t want to leave.
—Craig Morgan Teicher
Committed to exploring absurdity in bracing ways, these poems are compressed, wealth-of-detail anti-narratives. Within the borders of each shaped prose poem, the visible, the invisible, the hyperreal, the unreal, and the dreamt-up morph into each other. Marvelous contradictions fly at you. Portals to other worlds open and clap shut. Mr. Krumbach has a true sense of the theatrical and of deadpan. He wields a dry wit, and knows how to deploy sudden shifts of scale and scene to dizzy the reader when she most needs it. The poems create a place where bewilderment ripens into wonderment. But Mr. Krumbach says it way better, "Maybe we are meant to die of confusion once it peaks and turns to awe." This book probes surreality, bewilderment and awe in ways that feel nearly spiritual.
—Amy Gerstler
Peter Krumbach’s poems are lucid and crazy, disturbing, funny, and full of a sweet, consequential strangeness. The most effective kind of surrealism—this kind—puzzles and disorients us so we can sense how weird the world we take for granted really is. As one poem advises: “Just remember the long veil at the fringe of waking, weightless, yet self-aware.” The aim of Krumbach’s poems—I‘d say the aim of all true art—is to surprise us into paying attention. Then we can move out of thoughtless certainty toward amazement. “Thank you,” the poet writes, “for this uneven darkness.”
—Lawrence Raab