Sometimes I Forget How to Be a Person - by Peter Grandbois (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In Sometimes I Forget How to Be a Person, Peter Grandbois explores how the natural world shapes our understanding of self, grief, faith, and belonging.

Taking inspiration from Ted Hughes's Crow, the collection alternates intimate lyric poems with a sequence voiced by a darkly comic trickster who questions God, envies bees, and searches for meaning in an absurd and wounded world. "I wake with waiting/ wanting what tree I am/ to bird and leave."

Filled with birds, trees, insects, weather, and moments of startling beauty, these poems blur the boundaries between human and animal, body and landscape, asking what it means to remain open, connected, and fully alive.

Review Quotes

"In his stunning new collection, Sometimes I Forget How to be a Person, Peter Grandbois explores, with imagistic profusion, precision, and wonder, personhood as embedded, embodied in crows, trees, stones with tiny windows, yet no less haunted by the 'loneliness of being.' 'We slip into each other/until we are no longer, ' he writes, as if to find reprieve from alienation, doubt, and memory in imaginative absorption, only to be faced with the horror of erasure and the lingering of the beloved in our entanglements in nature. 'The self you loved when you were sure no one was watching, ' he says, 'is a stone set deep in a lake.' And still, it calls. Cold, dark, and utterly alone, it makes the mercy of affinity possible. The beauty of these poems bears witness."

--Bruce Bond, author of The Plural of Water

"Whether speaker, witness, or travel companion, Peter Grandbois's crow persona gives us one of the more unique sequences in recent American poetry. Far more than thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, Grandbois composes with a musicality that bridges the gap between story and song. He transforms his voice into pure lyricism at times, offering us, his reader, sentences so precise in their rhythm I dare say I can hear the alleluias that rise far beyond 'the lip of the world.'"

--Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Death Prefers the Minor Keys

"Alternating between poems about Crow and poems written from the perspective of an unidentified speaker, this book has the quality of a living watercolor: moments, emotions, images, thoughts, bleed through and into each other, creating an ever-changing sense of color and shape, of what is defined and seeking definition. Peter Grandbois is unusually attuned to the amorphousness of meaning, and his poems have a way of sliding, both linguistically and conceptually, across and through vastly different intellectual and emotional landscapes. At their core, as one poem states, these poems are offered as 'an incantation/against the loneliness of being.' For someone whose 'mind breeds a flurry of worries, ' solace is often found outside, within nature, for 'beyond/the window all things are full/of gods.' This is a beautiful and beautifully challenging book."

--Bob Hicok, author of Water Look Away

About the Author

Peter Grandbois is the author of sixteen previous books, including, most recently the poetry collection Story of a Pilgrim (Tiger Bark Press, 2026). His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in nearly two-hundred different journals. His plays have been nominated for several New York Innovative Theatre Awards and have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio, where he also coaches the fencing team. You can find him at www.petergrandbois.com