PRE-ORDER: Degenerate Era of An Expanding Universe

Degenerate Era of An Expanding Universe, by Jennifer Polson Peterson

**This is currently a PRE-ORDER title. Forthcoming Publication Date: June 9, 2026**

Degenerate Era of an Expanding Universe is a book about apocalypses large and small. The poems in this meditative debut collection explore economic and climatological trends toward dissolution, and how these forces seep into the domestic sphere. Whether exploring the constellations of family dynamics or observing natural and human disasters, Jennifer Polson Peterson reflects on “the newly unmade world” that nonetheless urges us to continue rebuilding. 

Jennifer Polson Peterson is the author of Degenerate Era of an Expanding Universe (Belle Point Press, 2026) and Must Resemble Leisure (Seven Kitchens Press, 2022). She serves as the 2024-28 Poet Laureate of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. In 2025 she was named a Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including The Threepenny Review, The Laurel Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, Image, The Southern Humanities Review, and Denver Quarterly. Her poems have been adapted for performance by choir and orchestra, featured on Poetry Daily, and nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize. She teaches writing at the University of Southern Mississippi. 

Praise for Degenerate Era of an Expanding Universe

“Reading the supple poems of Jennifer Peterson’s first collection, you’ll find language at once sensuous and pragmatic, formal and unnerving. Her book is an ark with a universe inside it. Making room for a miracle or two, it shows us how gentleness can coexist with fierce love, ruin reverse itself into new life, and form assume the pure fluidity of touch. In each line you’ll find the abrasion of the actual but also grace and unlooked for awakening.”

—Angela Ball, author of Steeplechase

“A lake drains. A foal is born on an ark. A grandmother disappears into herself by degrees. Peterson is watching all of it with the same unblinking attention, and what she finds is that these are not separate events. In Degenerate Era of an Expanding Universe, the domestic and the cosmological are not two registers but one, grief and tenderness operating at different scales of the same phenomenon. The line breaks arrive like small trapdoors. The poems do not announce their devastations. They simply open, and you fall. This book is a marvel.”

—Charlotte Pence, author of Code and Many Small Fires

“Jennifer Peterson’s Degenerate Era of an Expanding Universe is a hard book. But by ‘hard,’ I don’t mean ‘difficult.’ By ‘hard,’ I mean ‘engaged honestly with the world.’ These poems call to mind truths about life too often unacknowledged—truths, especially, about caregiving, its difficult, easy wonders. By such truths, the world is encompassed, and the greatest of mortal purposes described. Books about such things ought to be hard. But rarely are books about such things written so well, so wrenchingly, as this.”

—Shane McCrae, author of New and Collected Hell: A Poem

“In these deft and incisive poems, Jennifer Peterson reckons with climate crisis, motherhood, memory, and the cosmos, and gives domestic life its full and startling due. ‘These gifted lilies,’ writes Peterson, ‘ . . . blare and stain themselves gold. / The table holds their wreck of petals, / and more buds crescendo every day.’ I’m so moved and arrested by the ringing resonance of Jennifer Peterson’s voice. Degenerate Era of an Expanding Universe is a book that will stay with you—and you’ll be so grateful for its wise company.”

—Catherine Pierce, author of Dear Beast and former Mississippi Poet Laureate

Details:

• Publication date: June 9, 2026
• Trim size: 6 x 9 in

Check out more Belle Point poetry here.