Peter Conners is a poet and/or a prose poet. He is a fiction writer and an editor. He is an anthologist and an advocate for crossing boundaries in writing between poetry and prose. And soon he’ll have an autobiographical account coming out of his years spent touring with the Grateful Dead.

Full disclosure: The anthology Conners put together, PP/FF, containing works of “prose poetry,” “flash fiction” and all points in-between, was published by Starcherone Books, the press I direct. Peter and I have several times appeared together as readers at different venues, promoting this anthology.

I first began working with Peter after he guest edited an issue of American Book Review in 2005, devoted to what he called “PP/FF”: writing that was not what you could comfortably call either a story or a poem, yet wasn’t precisely what had sometimes rigidly become known as prose poetry either. Peter observed that a lot of new writers felt drawn to what he described as “Orphic” writing—writing that develops its form organically, out of what it needed to say, rather than as an example of an inherited genre. As had his own online magazine, Double Room, PP/FF: The Anthology provided a forum for this important new genre-jumping practice.

But “the Orphic” is but one part of Peter Conners the writer. He is truly a literature enthusiast, not simply dismantling but partaking in multiple modes of writing. His prose poetry collection, Of Whiskey and Winter, just out from Buffalo’s own White Pine Press, is the first of what will be three debuts in different genres in the next two years. A novella, Emily Ate the Wind, is due in Spring ’08, and Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead will be released in 2009 by Da Capo Press, a deal big enough to have been announced recently in Publisher’s Weekly.

Like Growing Up Dead, Emily Ate the Wind also deals with types of hallucinated confessions, centered around a working-class bar in a place much like Rochester. But perhaps riskiest about Conners’ body of work is how he counterbalances experimentation and edginess with sentimental evocations, as in the prose poem ”Snowbirds,” remembering grandparents’ trips south in winter:

Children, grandchildren, signs of the cross: signify the snowbird. My family flew with the snowbirds for years; six of us drafting on eighteen wheeler currents. A paneled station wagon stuffed with swimsuits, snorkels, eye drops and playing cards; despite daily divisions, united in flight. And my grandparents, those snowbirds, greeted us in powder blue plaids, pastels, seldom seen elbows and knees. Lovingly showed us their pool, their games, tidy early bird food and flock. The world of the snowbird.

“I am large,” wrote Whitman; “I contain multitudes.” Peter Conners seems to suggest that only by engaging in multiple stripes of writing can he give his own multiple subjecthood full expression.