Peter Norman finds the uncanny in the everyday. His poems surprise you, making you laugh and weep (sometimes simultaneously) with recognition at the fleeting spark of existence. Like archaeological sites between the strum und drang of our daily dramas, Norman’s poems excavate playgrounds freshly vacated, graves until recently inhabited, basements and dark corners where life and death go on without us. They present us with a world that lives and breathes and endures, where we are simply transitory visitors.
“Peter Norman’s The Gun That Starts the Race is sensually evocative and rich in imagery. Many of the poems bounce, like a stone skipping across the water’s surface.”
– Scene

“The Gun That Starts the Race takes aim and never misses. No word is wasted or feels out of place. Norman hits the bull’s-eye with every killer lyric. These poems are sardonic, mordant, and ironic in a suck-it-up sense. But the subjects that Norman worries come wrapped in wit. Like Sylvia Plath, he sees existence as a caustic comedy, the beautiful flesh bathed in acid. So, ‘an itch indicates healing, you think. / The kisses of an unseen porcupine / or acupunctured rat,’ Beware. For Norman, ‘Paradise’ is a virtual anagram of ‘despair.'”
“The Gun that Starts the Race is a bang on (pun intended) title for this impressive new collection from a poet of imminence and aftermath. As vigorous in execution as they are detached in tone, Peter Norman’s poems are finely formed odes to defining absences. He’s a singular writer whose poems linger, riddling.”