Entries from a Glacier
We’re thrilled to be publishing a beautiful new chapbook, Entries from a Glacier, with new poems by Katie Peterson & new photographs by Young Suh, in June 2026!
What do a girl falling into a lake, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the work of the imagination have in common? How will we remember this time, in which the glaciers are melting and the world as we know it appears to be melting as well? This collaborative book compiles lyric prose, poetry, collage, drawing, and photography to investigate these questions. A story of summertime sadness, contemporary anxiety, and poetic possibility, this collection is also a commonplace book, a scrapbook, and a letter for the future.
Praise for Entries From a Glacier
“This deft, strange and very beautiful book places its subjects (ecology, what it is to create, what it is to be a parent) in dreamlike relation to one another. Text and image are similarly in quiet, oblique conversation; they speak to one another across the page with a hushed wit and subtle melancholy. In doing so, multiple possibilities of meaning coalesce and accumulate as slowly and mysteriously as the layers of ice in the book’s central image. Peterson’s prose chimes with a delicate music. Like Suh’s photographs and exquisite pencil sketches, the writing is spare yet profoundly alert to the possibility of play – and of joy. Indeed, while the slowness and coolness of a glacier speaks through these pages in the crystalline beauty of text and image, this is also a book of warmth and hope. It is an invitation to think and to connect.”
— Katie Wakeling, author of The Rainbow Faults
“Set by a Swiss glacier and sourcing its energy from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s journal of his own visit to the Alps, Katie Peterson and Young Suh’s Entries from a Glacier meditates on the precariousness of daily, lived experience in the face of sweeping change. Peterson’s text—nostalgic, candid, and quietly spiritual—speaks from an alarmed present to a future hardly imaginable (yet ardently hoped for) through a process of “reaching[ing] back into the language…to find what fits.” The book flickers between Hopkins’s electrifying descriptions of glaciers (“as crisp as celery,” flung across the mountain like “the skin of a white tiger”) and Peterson’s own philosophical musings on motherhood (“a splitting that I could not shake”), her daughter (“Won’t you tell me your dream”) and the ephemeral nature of beauty (“sunlight like a bolt of fabric rolled across a table”). Suh’s gorgeous images punctuate the text, often reflecting paradoxical conditions through opposing textures: the sharp yet dissolving edges of glacial ice, spongey clouds drifting over a steep mountainside, the softness of a girl’s dress draped on a rock. It is a book of peeling layers, linguistic and visual: as Peterson suggestively asks, “When surfaces shift, what happens underneath?”
— Erica McAlpine, author of Small Pointed Things
Katie Peterson
Poems
Katie Peterson is the author of six books, including Life in a Field (2021) a text and image collaboration with the photographer Young Suh, and Fog and Smoke (2024) named a Book of the Year by the Times Literary Supplement. Peterson’s poems and reviews have appeared in the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Imagination, the New York Review of Books, Poetry London, and elsewhere. A Visiting Fellow at St Edmund’s Hall this year, she is Professor of English at UC Davis and makes her permanent home in California.
Young Suh
Photographs
Young Suh is a visual artist who uses photography, video, words, and handmade books to tell stories about human lives and the difficulties of our existence on Earth. His work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Datz Museum in South Korea, among others. He is currently Professor of Art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of California, Davis.
