Ivan R. Dee
Pages: 96
•
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-56663-763-3 • Hardback • September 2007 • $22.50 • (£16.99)
978-1-56663-808-1 • Paperback • June 2008 • $16.95 • (£12.99)
J. Allyn Rosser's Misery Prefigured, her second volume of poems, won the Crab Orchard Award and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2001. Her first collection of poems, Bright Moves, won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She teaches at Ohio University and lives in Athens, Ohio.
A poet on whom precious little is lost, J. Allyn Rosser loves to subject common experience to an uncommonly intense scrutiny. Getting lost, listening to a Dean Martin song, forgetting a name, encoutering a turtle, reading a children's book—all are studied here in lively fresh language for clues about the possible truth of life. To read Foiled Again is to be edified and delighted.
— Billy Collins
J. Allyn Rosser is a comic poet whose song is frequently tinged with sadness. She keeps her sense of humor even in the direst circumstances, as she digs into the nature of modern love and old fashioned loneliness, motherhood and solitude. In one of this collection's finest poems, 'Literature,' the poet admits, 'I could use a good poem to cheer me up.' These poems, in language that is spirited, inventive, and unflinching, never fail to be cheering, because they are so good.
— Mark Jarman
J. Allyn Rosser is a poet of ebullient energy, and she has a comic gift that is all too rare among her contemporaries.
— Georgia Review