on Fog and Smoke by Katie Peterson

Ecological poetry is at its most potent not when it explicates its cultural or historical milieu, but when it stages its own inability to do so. Or at least this is the stance of some of the major academic texts published in recent years. For instance, in Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds, Cary Wolfe heralds a nonrepresentational lyric mode that enacts the “paradoxically self-referential nature of observation.” Anahid Nersessian, meanwhile, in The Calamity Form, identifies a poetics born out of industrial capitalism (which, she stresses, we cannot disunite from climate change) that traffics in states of “unknowing,” or what she terms nescience. Such poems, writes Nersessian, offer no diagnosis of their historical moment and express, instead, what it is “to feel but not to get, to undergo but not to understand.” Braiding and then following these two lines of thought, it seems that the poem pairing calamity with ecology is doubly invested in working in and through those forms of distance, detachment, and depression brought on by ecological breakdown. 

Northern California, a place prone to disasters, proves a useful stage for such work. It’s also the setting of Fog and Smoke, the latest collection of poems by Katie Peterson. As its title suggests, Fog and Smoke navigates a climate of nescience produced by California’s wildfires. We can surmise some of the immediate causes—drought, failing energy infrastructures—backlit by the ongoing disaster of global heating, yet Peterson’s poems immerse themselves in the cloudiness of emergency, not as a form of passive acceptance but as a way of attending to those environmental signals and states of uncertainty that may not register with dominant modes of understanding. 

One of Peterson’s tools for navigating such states is the deployment of figurative language that simultaneously brings the world closer and keeps it at a remove. It’s this push-pull and the resultant prolonged states of ambiguity that energize much of the collection. “Fog,” the opening serial poem, clues us in to this activity by foregrounding two similes, the object of which, as we will see, drifts in and out of focus:

Like many moments in the collection, this tercet guides our reading through its subtle refusal of concreteness. The negation of “never” in the first line, along with the verb “suspended” in the second, contribute to that ambiguity, making it semantic. While “it” ostensibly points to fog, Peterson leaves some wiggle room between pronoun and antecedent. As a result, the simile itself carries the denotative weight, the figurative become more substantive than the literal. 

The emphasis on “it” highlights this pronoun’s importance as an airy site that the world temporarily occupies without ever quite settling. Instead, phenomena find expression in the various metaphors that the poem rolls out: 

As in the above passage, serial attempts at figuration energize the poem. I say attempts because Peterson’s figurative language often takes the form of lists whose items build upon each other without totally accumulating. The enduring effect isn’t one of failed denotation so much as a sort of faithfulness to objects or phenomena in their continual mutations. 

This drift between the literal and the metaphysical that defines “Fog” opens out to broader tensions between anthropogenic and natural disasters, ecological and political crises (as though such categories might be cleanly divorced). Early on in “Fog,” we realize we have slipped into the fog of pandemic and its attendant, social isolation. Peterson’s impulse is typically to downplay and demur, diffusing political weight by bringing things back down to earth. While certainly environmental, description plays a deceptively minor role. We rarely see the world in great detail. Rather, there’s attention to activity, as when, in the poem’s final section, the fog—of clouds? of pandemic?—having finally 

The enjambed stanza says it all. Set up to expect a little more detail, we get a “shape,” “streets,” “addresses,” “places”—things that aren’t quite things because still estranged from us. Maybe that’s why the poem’s closing simile, “Midmorning traffic like blood in a vein,” feels so appropriate: as with the opening lines, it’s another simile that carries all the weight, enlivening a stanza apparently full of life.

A refusal to fully disclose is by no means unique to Peterson, certainly not unique to poetry more broadly. What feels particular, however, to Fog and Smoke is its use of ambiguity as a prolonged state during which seemingly distinct crises become, at key moments, virtually indistinguishable. This is why, in poems like “Fog,” we slip easily from the obscurity inherent to ecological rhythms to more generalized forms of confusion and distress, specifically those brought on by pandemic. And it’s why the poem “Smoke,” named for that form of obscurity supposedly easier to tie to its cause—combustion—becomes our shared condition, the air we literally breathe: 

While “Smoke” may read conventionally grammatical alongside “Fog,” relying more on the conjunction than it does the paratactical comma or period, it’s jumpier. Just read aloud and feel how quickly the statement beginning with “but,” which resolves that of the sixth line, itself gets negated by “though”—a ricochet between pacification and panic. As an indication of emergency, smoke exteriorizes but speeds up thought’s causal links, the mind more naked in its anxiety, though we end on a note approximating calm:

That last line is worth lingering on. The notion of a wisdom residing in the body indexes Fog and Smoke not just within a tradition of ecopoetics but, I would wager, within a form of nescience somewhat unique to California. We might think of Joan Didion’s articulation of the behavioral changes triggered by the Santa Ana, that seasonal, down-slope wind that prefigures wildfire in Southern California. Peterson similarly negotiates various states of anticipation, anxiety, and unknowing that define moments between or adjacent to those “infrequent but violent extremes,” in Didion’s words. To the extent that California bears an intimate relationship with disaster, we can situate Fog and Smoke within a literary tradition that attends to those events as they are registered just below the horizon of comprehension, opting for visceral response over discursivity. To feel but not to get. To undergo but not to understand.

If those two titular poems are at all representative of the collection, we might look to them for how Peterson negotiates blindness, be it literal and figurative. For this reason, a poem like “The Fire Map” becomes all the more curious, situated as it is at the zenith of (at least a certain kind of) sight. Named for an increasingly prevalent interactive platform that tracks, measures, and archives climate catastrophe, “The Fire Map” inhabits a hyper-visual terrain while feeling out its limits as an instrument of knowledge production. Peterson pokes at those limits by involving, where possible, her own embodied position: not merely a disembodied gaze scanning the landscape, but a person at her computer, moving through at her own speed. As if to echo the map’s implicit erasure of these variables, Peterson returns to the generalized, second-person pronoun occasionally seen in “Fog,” noting that “you can find [the fires] / if you pause the arrow / on the map, and press with your finger, but not too hard.” The inclusion of these small procedures reminds us of the map’s analog dimensions. Still, rather than “someone who lived through those fires,” the speaker is a user, passively receiving information rather than participating in its construction. Too much touch, she playfully cautions, oversteps that boundary, a minor transgression for which one is “sent back / to the first map, laid out in its bordered shape, the template of the state.” 

That template, of course, is a fantasy, born out of the fiction of a two-dimensional plane. Part of the dream of the map is that there is no room for an observer to mess with it; the map dreams of having no dreams at all. Toward the end, however, a dream is precisely what enters, in the form of an extended simile that throws the sentence, like a fire over a freeway, from one stanza to another:

The supposed neutrality of this digital terrain makes Peterson’s penultimate intervention even more poignant, as she offers us an altogether different kind of seeing. It’s a surprising move, this superimposition of the domestic onto the topographical, akin, at first glance, to the map’s own (if implicit) function of imposing sight as the dominant means of understanding. That is, unless we see the simile not as an intervention but an unfolding of what is already there—latent, we might say—in the map. Even while operating behind the shroud of the second person, the gesture affirms Peterson’s investment in the figurative not simply as a rupture in routine ways of knowing but rather as an expansion of them that embraces association, indirection, unpredictability, and intimacy. 

After all, a map that “disappears five years after they make it” can only show so much, beholden as it is to a kind of currency. It cannot “record our smoke,” Peterson reminds us in the poem’s final line, returning us to that most chimerical of figures. But even more than her invocation of this trope, what should strike us is the sheer boldness of smoke as a metaphor, that it in no way dissembles itself as such. Smoke comes to stand for those variables that, like so many mapped fires, can’t be contained, can’t be given a set of coordinates. It’s within that indeterminacy where, if not knowledge of our perilous present, feeling might be found.

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Fog and Smoke. By Katie Peterson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024. 96 pp. $27.00.