Unpublished Poems

Broc Rossell was born in Los Angeles and lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is completing a doctorate in literature and creative writing.

"But I don't know but a book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf – at any rate it is safer from criticism. And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel – you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety – & even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble."
– Herman Melville

"Susie, what shall I do – there is'nt room enough; not half enough, to hold what I was going to say. Wont you tell the man who makes sheets of paper, that I hav'nt the slightest respect for him!"
– Emily Dickinson

"I am the outskirts of a nonexistent town, a prolix commentary on an unwritten book. I am no one, no one. I don't know how to feel, how to think, how to love. I am a character in an unwritten novel, passing by, airy and unmade, without having existed, amid the dreams of whoever it is who didn't know how to complete me."
– Bernardo Soares to Fernando Pessoa

"You can't derange, or re-arrange,
your poems again. (But the sparrows can their song.)
The words won't change again. Sad friend, you cannot change."
– Elizabeth Bishop