A Child Turns Back to Wave

Book excerpt: Peter Neil Carroll has written about place in America both as an historian and as a poet. His first book of poetry inspired further travels around the country exploring lost landscapes, history, and culture from the Black Hills and New Mexico desert to the Ohio Valley. These poems are presented here in his second collection A Child Turns Back to Wave: Poetry of Lost Places, winner of Prize Americana. Carroll's poems have appeared in Poetrybay, Written Rivers, Poetry Flash, Pacific Review, Sand Hill Review, Earthspeak, Review Americana, Blue Moon Literary Review, Monterey Poetry Review, and New Mexico Poetry Review. He has taught creative writing at the University of San Francisco and history at Stanford University.