Raw Goods Inventory
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
In Raw Goods Inventory, Emily Rosko gives us a poetic inventory in a virtuosic display of voices and accents. The poems come with sharp elbows and knees; they are nomadic, acquisitive, dispersive, and diffractive. More elementally, Rosko’s poems contain the scattered bric-a-brac of the imagination, with goods that range from a dud egg to genetic hybrids, from Marian iconography to pigs at a state fair. She offers honest embodiments of anxiety, awkwardness, and boredom, as she also recasts with wit and grace the standard poetic fare: love, death, and disappointment. Idiomatic, raw, and skewed in the best possible way, Rosko’s poetry manages to speak to us---with arresting lyric gusto---of familiar things.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her lyrical and fragmentary Iowa Poetry Prize-winning debut, Rosko, a former Stegner, Ruth Lilly and Javits fellow, explores the borders where the natural and the manmade meet. In neat couplets, tercets or shapely stanzas, these 50 poems treat pigs at state fairs, missed communications between lovers, antiseptic hospital waiting rooms and the funeral marches of elephants. Fabricated and natural artifacts collude to create chilly metaphors for contemporary ennui: "...I'll escape to / the deserted drive-in lot where the movie screen is missing / panels and is overshadowed by pines." Reflexive observations make many of these poems refreshingly vulnerable: "Oh, sex-drive that won't be active forever!" At times, however, content takes a back seat to wordy sentence formulations and obscure language. Rosko's tendency toward lyricism makes this a promising first collection.
