Joel Peckham – författare

Outraged and Amazed focuses on how Absalom, Absalom!'s complex narrative functions as a vehicle through which social order in the South is represented, challenged and renegotiated. Exploring Quentin Compson's attempt to understand his own identity through the complicated and incomplete story of Thomas Sutpen, it demonstrates how the poetics, structure and central conflicts of the novel derive from a combination of its characters' intense resistance to their proscribed social limitations and their desire to wrest control of their identities through and from the act of storytelling. Intending to present a narrative that could explain the past in a way that makes sense of their world and their place in it, these would-be authors are instead confronted with their limitations and the inadequacy of their knowledge. Outraged and Amazed explores the bewildering, tangled, dislocated, and confused story we are left with – a story of the South that is plausible but unverifiable, at once self-reflexively fictive and true.

Joel Peckham's Bone Music does many things so well:  it invokes the blue tones and rhythms of Charlie Parker, and the improvisations suggested by 'Prologue' move the music and rhythms, 'layering one upon another,' throughout the book.  But, the poet is the musician, the horn blower, who must ever be 'Waiting.  Wondering where the next beat would come, if it would come . . . a pulse, a roll to bring him back into the song completely new.'  This sets the stage for the concert of prose poems that follow, and in Bone Music the reader will find the best book of prose poems since Karl Shapiro's The Bourgeois Poet from the 1960s.  In 'The Wreckage That We Travel In,' he writes, 'The world must take us by surprise,' and, indeed, we are given the details, as if they were notes played, of surprise.  If it's not the wreckage of automobiles, it may be the wreckage of lives and what to do with them. Bone Music takes us through such interludes and more. As Peckham writes in 'Arrhythmia,' this is 'what listening means,' the music 'finding in the storm, the harmony, the single tap of rain among the many rhythms, the molecule of silence beating like a heart.'

On the rainy evening of November 14, 1970, a chartered jetliner crashed on its approach to land at Tri-State Airport in Huntington, West Virginia. All seventy-five passengers were killed, including most of Marshall University's Thundering Herd football team, coaches and staff, prominent community supporters, and the flight crew. The crash of Southern Airways Flight 932— known as "the Marshall Plane Crash" and memorialized in the film We Are Marshall (2006)—remains the single worst air tragedy in US sports history. The magnitude and impact of the accident devastated not only Marshall's student body and employees, but the community of Huntington and beyond._x000D_Flight 932 reconstructs the Marshall Plane Crash and its ripple effects, blending research on collective trauma with the profiles and testimonies of surviving loved ones, witnesses, and the officials who remain deeply affected by it decades later. The result is a composite picture of an American town's struggle to make sense of the horrors of this defining catastrophe, and to still find a way to forge ahead in the aftermath.