Peter Krumbach is the author of Degrees of Romance (Elixir Press, 2024), the winner of The Antivenom Poetry Award. His work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Manhattan Review, Washington Square Review and elsewhere.

Other poems on the web by Peter Krumbach:
Two poems
Two poems
"Nostalgia"
"Geese"
Five poems
"The Duck"
"Beach Town at the End of Summer"
"Explaining Marriage to an Alien"
"Falling Asleep in the Yard"
"The Greenland Shark"
"Jumper"
"WebPoem"
"WebPoem"
"WebPoem"
"WebPoem"
"WebPoem"
Two poems
Three poems
Four poems
Five poems
Six poems
Seven poems
Eigth poems
# poems

Peter Krumbach's Website.

About Degrees of Romance:

"Peter Krumbach's Degrees of Romance is a dark romp through the surreal spaces of the everyday. In these brief prose poems, hauntingly funny in the manner of Russell Edson, Charles Simic, and Zachary Schomburg, the 'woman on the park bench opens her husband's head' to find 'another head inside'; a bear 'went door to door on his hind legs and asked for romance'; and breaths are carefully counted into the hundreds of millions. These antics serve to guard—and simultaneously, somehow, illuminate—'a realm where some great secret is to be divulged.' Once inside, you won't want to leave."
—Craig Morgan Teicher

"Committed to exploring absurdity in bracing ways, these poems are compressed, wealth-of-detail anti-narratives. Within the borders of each shaped prose poem, the visible, the invisible, the hyperreal, the unreal, and the dreamt-up morph into each other. Marvelous contradictions fly at you. Portals to other worlds open and clap shut. Mr. Krumbach has a true sense of the theatrical and of deadpan. He wields a dry wit, and knows how to deploy sudden shifts of scale and scene to dizzy the reader when she most needs it. The poems create a place where bewilderment ripens into wonderment. But Mr. Krumbach says it way better, 'Maybe we are meant to die of confusion once it peaks and turns to awe.' This book probes surreality, bewilderment and awe in ways that feel nearly spiritual."
—Amy Gerstler

"Peter Krumbach's poems are lucid and crazy, disturbing, funny, and full of a sweet, consequential strangeness. The most effective kind of surrealism—this kind—puzzles and disorients us so we can sense how weird the world we take for granted really is. As one poem advises: 'Just remember the long veil at the fringe of waking, weightless, yet self-aware.' The aim of Krumbach's poems—I'd say the aim of all true art—is to surprise us into paying attention. Then we can move out of thoughtless certainty toward amazement. 'Thank you,' the poet writes, 'for this uneven darkness.'"
—Lawrence Raab