Rachel Danielle Peterson is a contributing editor at Poet's Quarterly and a member of VIDA. Her work has received numerous honors and has been featured in Front Porch, Literary Imagination, Arsenic Lobster, Midwestern Gothic, Los Angeles Review, Upstart, Her Royal Majesty, the Inspirer, and Revolver.

Books by Rachel Danielle Peterson:

Other poems on the web by Rachel Danielle Peterson:
"Why I Wasn't Supposed to Be Born"

Rachel Danielle Peterson on Twitter.

About A Girl's A Gun:

"Rachel Danielle Peterson's collection, A Girl's A Gun, reads as part tall tale, part bildungsroman, part geode. These are poems meant to be enclosed in a palm and pressed against the heart. Peterson's strengths are in her cinematic depictions of women, her vibrant imagery, and the precision with which she code-switches into the tongue of the mountains. The heady combination leaves the reader a bit breathless and we plummet with her into a line that feels like proverb, such as in 'Birthday,' 'The heart is cruel/an organ with no song.' These poems do not balk at their own content, circling around love that is tough or risky or absent or misplaced. They press on, lead the way, suggest that there's no way around but through."
—Bianca Lynne Spriggs

"With a mouth full of sticky mountain laurel, Appalachian soul liquor, exclamatory verve, iconoclastic Biblical gospel, and tender purchase, Rachel Peterson's A Girl's A Gun cross-talks with a prodigious and prodigal personal and poetic tribe that includes family members, figures from mythology, Jeanne d'Arc, Apollinaire, and a host of hymns and rock ballads. 'Home is in the vocal chords— / the sound,' she writes in 'Harlan County.' By turns vernacular and soaring with lyricism, Peterson's foray into the emotional violence, Eros, and beauty of the places that hold us, and that we hold inside, evokes another American innovator, Emily Dickinson, who not only felt her life to be a loaded gun but who also, like Peterson, puts language under such unique psychological pressure that it almost seems to be its own tongue."
—Lisa Russ Spaar