Degrees of Romance, by Peter Krumbach

Publication date: January 1, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-9324-1882-8
$17

Degrees of Romance by Peter Krumbach won the 2022 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award. Contest judge, Candice Reffe describes the book: “These dazzling prose poems are a portal into ‘a realm where some great secret is to be divulged, the gate to what's been sought but never found briefly ajar.’ Enter. Details of ordinary life—the scraping of a spoon, the ‘fat blue mailbox bolted to a sidewalk’"—shimmer like auras the poet reads in the world around us. Part observation, part divination, the poems send messages in invisible ink that appear when you tip them to the sun, the dispatch you've been waiting for.”

Peter Krumbach was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia. After graduating with a degree in visual arts, he left the country, and eventually found his way to the U.S. He worked in commercial art (New York), as a translator and broadcaster (Washington, D.C.), and, for the last 25 years, has lived and written in Southern California.