These straight canals cutting through
the landscape like wet shiny rulers
remind me of the curved ones dancing
late from the Middle Ages…

There was sweat in his eyes from the raku’s barrel of fire when artist Petter Dahlström Persson asked the pond strider, “What force pulls the shadows across the water in the evening?” Keys in the sun, keys in the shade, this is the book of poems he made.

In Sweaty Leaves, Petter Dahlström Persson’s poems alternate between mellow in-between moments with mint-colored eggs in your palm and the guttural viciousness of gulls. Meanwhile, a high-speed Intercity Express train foreshortens between dormant interwar dairy factories. The futuristic train tries to be fast, but Petter has a way of decelerating the present until it reverses into the past, or at least into a snack break.

The poems are accompanied by odd and oddly logical ink drawings of the collection’s motifs: water drops dripping into rippling puddles, a perspiring igloo, Shade itself slipping and sliding, and the friendliest of keyholes.

Comes with a sturdy limited-edition bookmark featuring a poem of Petter’s embedded in a colored-pencil drawing of a stout beer bottle.