Description
Book SynopsisCharting a journey through schoolyards and laundromats, suburban gardens and rice paddies, yoga studios and rural highways, Michelle Brittan Rosado crafts poems that blend elegy and praise. In settings from California to Malaysian Borneo, she explores themes of coming-of-age, mixed-race identity, diaspora, and cultural inheritance.
Trade ReviewStrikes just the right, clear note to place in the register of memorable debuts. Rosado's terrific new poems are salve and honey, even when the subjects of breaking and coming apart are at their beautiful core. Listen to the brilliant music of these pages."" - Aimee Nezhukumatathil, contest judge
""Exhilarating, tactile poems- embodied, rich and full. Michelle Brittan Rosado is a visionary architect building and following interior maps within intricate landscapes, creating luminous revelation and deep calm. A book like this gives you your life back."" - Naomi Shihab Nye, author of
Voices in the Air""The sense of a divided homeland- California and Malaysia- first splits then doubles the impassioned focus of these precisely crafted, complexly braided meditations on the self and family inheritance. Psychologically searing and yet always resonant with the world's pleasures, these poems unfold as an album of belated and tender homecomings."" - David St. John, author of
The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems""An intimate book that draws the world inside its discoveries, both ordinary and extraordinary. Each poem offers us miracles by which we persist beyond the surface of language itself. Luminous in craft and intelligence, here is an original voice that questions, and ultimately celebrates, the profound wonder of our survival."" - Rachel Eliza Griffiths, author of
Lighting the ShadowTable of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Ode to the Double “L”
- I
- Western History
- Pastoral with Restless Searchlight
- How to Use Microsoft Paint to Alter a Birth Certificate
- Only Child
- Ambivalence
- Dementia
- Across the Street from Foxboro Elementary School, an Inmate Escapes California State Prison Solano
- Vanishing Ship
- The Elements Have Learned to Speak
- Theory on Falling into a Reef
- Customs
- Between
- Poem for My Twin
- Our Bodies Were Once the Color of Our Masks
- The Hotel Eden
- Asking about My First Name
- Debt
- Poem for My Mother
- Rootless
- My Father’s Work
- The Sky Will Look White
- Pantun
- Poem for My Maternal Grandfather
- Ritual
- Photograph Taken by My Paternal Grandmother on Her Honeymoon, 1944
- Elegy without Translation
- My Dead Live in Two Rooms
- II
- The Dissolution Paperwork Asks if I Need to Restore My Name
- Late Summer
- Sea Shanty for the Divorced
- The Numerology of Us
- Old Knives
- The Tower District
- This Poem Wants to Be a House
- Fresno Laundromat without Air-Conditioning in Late July
- Contemporary Artifacts
- Portrait of His Ex-Lover at a Yoga Studio, Downtown Fresno
- Incident between Two Exits
- Why Can’t It Be Tenderness
- The Sweetest Exile Is the One You Choose
- A Name Made of Asterisks
- Mistaken Ode
- Love after Dentistry
- On Waking When You’re Already Leaving
- While You Are Gone
- An anchor in the shape of an ampersand
- Visitations with Unmarried Self
- Glaucoma Test in the Post-Racial Era
- Breaking a Sugar Bowl the Morning after a Lunar Eclipse
- Lullaby in Which It Becomes Impossible Not to Talk about Race
- Notes
