Peter Pereira

Peter Pereira is a physician, a poet, and the founder of Floating Bridge Press. His poems are marked by their wit, humane observations, and range of both form and subject. In his collections What’s Written on the Body (2007) and Saying the World (2003), and his chapbook, The Lost Twin (2000), he seamlessly traverses his favorite themes, which include his work as a primary care provider at an urban clinic in Seattle, domestic life, suffering and the human condition, and the slippage of language. He is as comfortable with free-verse narratives as he is with anagrams, and Gregory Orr calls him “a master of many modes, all of them yielding either wisdom or delight.” Edward Byrne has praised his formal innovations, “inventive use of language,” and “unexpected” juxtapositions. Pereira’s investigations have a prevailing undercurrent of celebration in the tradition of Walt Whitman, and even his deepest explorations of suffering are likely to be suffused with humor or hope.

Pereira’s work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and several anthologies, including Best American Poetry and To Come to Light: Perspectives on Chronic Illness in Modern Literature. He has received the “Discovery”/The Nation and Hayden Carruth prizes, and has been a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. He lives in Seattle, Washington.