Cover photo: Lisa Schmidt
What Others Say About Rumors of Fallible Gods:
“The poems in Rumors of Fallible Gods take us on a journey into the world, sometimes into what Peter Ludwin calls ‘the country in between,’ those places ‘where beauty and violence blur.’ Along the way we will pass through villages of the Tarahumara in the Sierra Madre Occidental, through the Peruvian Andes and the Ecuadorian Amazon, through Greece, Turkey, Morocco, and the Terezin Concentration Camp in Bohemia, and on to Nepal, China, Tibet. But these poems do not merely describe places—they inhabit them. These poems are more interested in discovery than they are in invention. Ludwin has a lucid eye for details, he sees clearly, he does not avoid or look away, as he builds the landscape of the poem and etches it within us. For me the high points of this book are the series of eight-line poems, the octets, that end each of the two sections. Here we find an artist at the peak of his powers, where vision and craft conjoin ‘to inhabit the transparent pearl, the drop/in perpetual motion that spells a history.’ When you pick up Peter Ludwin’s book, put on your traveling shoes—you’re going on a journey.”
– Joseph Stroud, author of Below Cold Mountain, Country of Light and Of This World
“With Rumors of Fallible Gods Peter Ludwin establishes himself as a citizen of the poetic imagination, availing readers of the intricate relationships between the geopolitical and the personal worlds we create and shape every day. Ludwin weaves his themes on two broad, revolving axes—one as defined by travels through Latin America, especially Mexico and Peru—the other through Greece, the Czech Republic, Morocco, and the Tibetan region of Sichuan Province in China. Imbued with passion and musicality, the poems bear witness to transformative experience forged by wheels and feet, hands and wings; by the living ghosts of mythology; and by human vultures who prey on the many yearning for liberation and love. Ludwin is inhabitant and traveler, respecting the nature of his sudden arrival and inevitable departure, always at home in the epiphanic air.”
– William O’Daly, translator of many books by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda
Or read selected poems from Rumors of Fallible Gods