“In her third collection, Peterson confronts a mother’s death and earthly loss. With consistent measure and emotional depth, she creates a coherent world in miniature that mirrors the ever-shortening time frame of life. In one especially innovative sequence, alternating lines collapse into stanzas, recreating the finitude of mortality. Throughout the book, objects find fibrous, sinewy forms, things hewn and woven, lashed together like spirit to body. The speaker in ‘From the Nest’ watches a patient struggle to ‘turn the sounds / the sick mouth makes / into prayer.’ But also the shapes of new life rise—clawed feet, extra leaves, trellised limbs that terminate in the small hands of branches. Elsewhere, Peterson turns to the language of backyard gardening and tending nettles. Likewise, those familiar, refulgent faces, ‘the moon’s / deckle edge’ and the red sun, all ‘rust and blush and sunset, shining.’”

Diego Báez | Booklist

“Stark, smart, funereal, terrifying at times. . . . Peterson’s is a careful, serious poetry, difficult in the way that real life is difficult, but clear and chilly as a long-held regret.”

Publishers Weekly

“Katie Peterson’s impressive poems belong to the school of omission and inference. ‘I didn’t come here to make speeches,’ she says in her poem ‘Earth,’ yet the poems in The Accounts fill you with wonder at what is not being said so skillfully. ‘Pockets of silence,’ they are called, and they contain precise measurements of feeling and thought. In their quiet complexity, Peterson’s accounts involve and entrap the reader in serious conversation.”

Tony Hoagland

“The narrator of Katie Peterson’s book The Accounts has strayed into a myth in which no guiding figures remain, and with no way to prove or save herself. Who knew the complexity of grief could be drawn with such shocking simplicity and masterful depth?”

Mary Kinzie

“As the title of this brilliant book suggests, Katie Peterson prizes the plural, the multiple, the still to be said. That earth has given her, as it has given each of us, one story, a story that ends, is the source not only of her outrage but also of her patience: sentences that enact the work of thinking and feeling as if never to end. At the center of this labyrinth, a mother’s death, a daughter’s grief.   ‘Do not ask what has been lost,’ says Katie Peterson, ‘ask what changed.’ To read The Accounts is to be changed in turn, to require what the author of these hauntingly intelligent poems will say next.”

James Longenbach

“Recently, I’ve been inspired by Katie Peterson’s collection of poems, The Accounts. It’s a sober, psychologically delicate work. Peterson endows apparently commonplace observations with immense symbolic resonance and emotional power: it’s an art of strategic understatement.”

Rosanna Warren | Poetry Foundation

"Peterson mindfully documents grief’s intricacies from unexpected angles. . . . Peterson’s music isn’t easy; or rather, it isn’t simple. It’s rich, well-conceived, and reveals its maker as one of great integrity and intelligence."

West Branch