Danielle Blau's Hecht Prize-winning debut collection, PEEP invites you into a world so strange it is utterly familiar, a world from our ancient past that could also be the future--or a twisted version of the present.
It is a mirror world where the husk of our culture shows starkly, and yet it is lit by joy, in the words, the verses themselves. PEEP is uncanny, primal, magical, capturing hopelessness, gridlock, our impact on the environment and those around us, questioning progress and the language we use to speak to each other, each little peep a little life desperate to not pass unnoticed.
"PEEP is a tour de force, and it's more than a tour de force. It displays deep within itself, for all its intellectual and imaginative power and self-delight, a curious tenderness and vulnerability. The book glories in language and thinking; it's imaginative and bold; but it's also intimate." — Vijay Seshadri
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Danielle Blau’s debut full-length poetry collection peep was selected by Vijay Seshadri for the 2021 Anthony Hecht Prize and was published in 2022 in both the US and the UK by the Waywiser Press. Her nonfiction book Rhyme or Reason: Poets and Philosophers on the Problem of Being Here Now is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. Poetry, short stories, articles, and interviews by Blau appear in The Atlantic, Australian Book Review, The Baffler, The Literary Review, Narrative Magazine, The New Yorker’s book blog, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Blau teaches at Hunter College in Manhattan, and curates and hosts the monthly Gavagai Music + Reading Series in Queens, where she lives with her son Kai.
Vijay Seshadri is the author of the poetry books Wild Kingdom, The Long Meadow, The Disappearances, (Harper-Collins India), 3 Sections, and, in 2020, That Was Now, This Is Then, as well as dozens of essays, reviews, and memoir fragments. His work has been widely published and anthologized and recognized with a number of honors, among them the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.