SENECA REVIEW

Sound Like Trapped Thunder by Jessica Lind Peterson

In lieu of a fall 2020 issue, Seneca Review Books released Jessica Lind Peterson's Sound Like Trapped Thunder. Winner of the 2020 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize, Jessica Lind Peterson explores tensions between domesticity and wildness, often discovering latent elements of magic within the mundane.

Full of lyrical sentences, stylized prose, and moments that are by turns funny and poignant, and often both at once, Sound Like Trapped Thunder troubles the distinction between the human and the animal, calling into question such tidy categories we rely upon to help make sense of ourselves and the world we live in.

"Peterson leads us, swirlingly, into the mystery through gorgeous, kaleidoscopic renderings of memory, being, and place. Infused with startling metaphor and similes, the poetic sparks of her images are only outdone by her ability to bring her trove into crisp focus, revealing the core of the very thing she wanted to save us from. Sound Like Trapped Thunder is a deep dive into despair, yes, but also reveals how lovely is the ascent." —Jenny Boully, book prize judge and author of The Body and Betwixt-and-Between
Sound Like Trapped Thunder by Jessica Lind Peterson
You can order Sound Like Trapped Thunder from directly from us or from SPD, Bookshop, or Amazon.

Additional Praise

"In 'Poetry and Grammar,' Stein perhaps set the difference between prose poetry and lyric prose when she wrote, 'Sentences are not emotional, but paragraphs are. I can say that as often as I like and it always remains as it is, something that is.' Except that it isn't. In Jessica Lind Peterson's collection, she composes sentences like music, challenging prose grammar, fiddling the strings of syntax like one would bow a violin. The staccato rhythm, the lush reach, the looping of the line, all contribute to a compelling collage of essays on family, the external world, and the thorny relationships between people. With the investigatory devotion of a Stein but the sharp wit of an Ursule Molinaro, these essays captivate."
— Kazim Ali, author of The Voice of Sheila Chandra and Silver Road
"Jessica Lind Peterson's essay collection Sound Like Trapped Thunder delights and unsettles at once. This is no wide-eyed nature book that expounds on the goodness of a pristine place, but one that holds awe and terror in equal measures; it celebrates, probes, wrestles with and questions the cruelty, loneliness, beauty and mystery of the natural world, and in doing so, searches for a way to situate the human heart within it - animals that we are - to find home, build home, and come home all at once."
— Angela Pelster, author of Limber and The Curious Adventures of India Sophia
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