From privilege at a gas station to fraud in a memorial grove, Joyce Peseroff follows the faults of indifference and division that crack our impulses toward mercy and love. She nests fragmented tales of the overheard and overlooked—lonely widowers, a lost hiker, predatory trees, an angry jury—in poems that bring a formal restlessness to common speech. With wit and compassion,
Petition
renders the tense joys and vivid griefs of mortal and moral experience in the luminous moment when the ordinary becomes singular.