Perestroika Poems

By A. R. Peterson

The search that culminates in "Perestroika Poems" took Peterson more than half a century. It began in 1959 when he questioned the death of his father. The answer to that question led through Farrar's "Life of Christ" and the King James family bible to the publication in 1996 of Peterson's first poetry book: "Deconstructing the Rock", now available on Amazon. The Rock of the title is Peterson himself (son of the rock) and all that he held dear, including the Rock of Ages and the church that was built upon it. And then he read "Holy Blood Holy Grail", "The Lost Gospel" and the gospel of Judas Thomas in the "Nag Hammadi Library". And that led to the perestroika (reconstruction) in "Perestroika Poems". The edifice he builds here is not! Its foundations are the sea of uncertainty. It's architecture owes much to Cynics like Diogenes and Jesus himself, poets like Ogden Nash and X.J.Kennedy, atheists and skeptics like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the Skeptic's Society of Michael Shermer. But Peterson is neither atheistic nor even agnostic. This work puts Peterson in a class by himself: he holds that all supernaturalism, especially the foundation of all religions, is not just phony, it is pure, unmitigated nonsense, and the casuistry that it breeds is viciously dangerous. Even so, you the reader might actually find yourself lulled into the warm fuzzies by the end of "Actual", which is Peterson's interpretation of Judas Thomas. But "Perestroika Poems" has a sting in the tail in its very last poem. If you can survive that, more power to you!

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1477542671
• ISBN13: 9781477542675
• Release Date: July 2012
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 146 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.3" x 5.5"