The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep

Author: Trace Peterson

Publisher: Saturnalia Books (2025)

The second book of poems by Trace Peterson, The Valleys Are So Lush And Steep, attempts to answer the question: what do you do after you’ve introduced yourself? Modeling aspects of trans interiority, embodied experiences, struggles, and desires from the era before the “trans tipping point” to our present state of emergency, this book also speaks to universal issues of how self, imagination, language, and the environment are intertwined; how gender can structure anyone’s experience as both limiting and enabling.

Through lyric poems, prose poems, serial poems, and texts that disrupt prosody and invent new forms, Peterson uses humor, non sequitur, equanimity, and anger to critique deserving targets and celebrate trans joy where she can glimpse it. Her love poetry, protest poetry, elegies, and pastoral poetry put queer romance in conversation with enthusiastically unnatural nature. Jamie Lee Curtis, sporks, Black Lives Matter, hydro-powered turbines, Sappho, violets, Laverne Cox, art history, Imogen Binnie, wedding bouquets, Michael Kors, drones, gurus, Caitlyn Jenner, wasps, and Mark Rothko share pages with ecosystems that become courtly allegories, scenes of interrogation, or potential leads for a path out of this mess. Addressing a combination of trans and non-trans audiences strategically, this book intervenes in communities of both poetry and life.