Young Stars of the Bubble

Carbonation Press 014 | August 2025

ISBN: 978-1-300-14469-4 | $16.00

Available: https://www.carbonationpress.com/catalog-2/014-young-stars-of-the-bubble-by-andrew-k-peterson

Young Stars of the Bubble is a radiant, restlessly inventive collection that traverses lyric, collage, and elegy to map memory and desire. Andrew K. Peterson writes with an open intelligence and keen spirit, capturing fleeting joys and subterranean currents bubbling under contemporary life. Drifting between the ecstatic and the everyday, or grounded in friendship and loss, these kaleidoscopic poems shimmer with pop detritus. In linked suites shaped around winter and the alphabet, Peterson attends to lyric moments, echoing back language that feels both ephemeral and essential. This is a book that invites you to “go in among others,” and — maybe — come out changed.

“For two decades Andrew K. Peterson has regaled readers with tuned and resonant poems that are consistently startling, compassionate, flirtatious, and heartbreakingly beautiful. Here in Young Stars of the Bubble, Peterson continues to traverse language, tone, and rhythm with his unique blend of abstraction and personal, intimate art. These poems incite us to “run uncaught through/wolf-shaped arms,” “drunk-glad and in love,” to “grow rogue,” and ultimately, to “scream inside your heart.” Please join me in celebrating not only a triumphant collection of poems, but also, and perhaps not least, a great, great poet, and one of my dearest friends.” — Joseph Cooper

“It’s so easy to slip into the rhythm of Peterson’s keen perception, and the rewards are many. His work is refreshingly open and generous, allowing the reader to share in his awareness with a sense of recognition. Beauty, brokenness, whimsy and profundity meet you where you didn’t know you were. Or,

Recognition
Slip sidewise through the door of Peterson perception
Scales fall from eyes and awareness grows into clarity
Beauty, brokenness, whimsy and profundity
meet you where you didn’t know you were”

– Jane Werle