​Winner of the Two Sylvias Press 2017 Wilder Series Book Prize

Praise for All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts:

Dana Roeser’s voice—hilarious, tragic, musical, transcendent—announces itself in the title of this collection, and in every line to follow. This is work that is deceptively skilled, written by a poet with a sure hand, a sense of comic timing as well as of the abrupt, stabbing surprise, with an ear for the music of our language and mastery of her poetry’s artwork—precisely intricate, finely wrought, and so purely achieved that it becomes as transparent as all things magically invisible but vibrantly animate, echoing and mocking and illuminating the transparencies of this collection’s title. To read this poetry is to appreciate not only the talent of this poet, but to feel renewed in one’s faith in poetry itself. How exciting to discover this voice—kind, profane, pure, and honest—and to be moved and changed, amused and reassured, frightened and satisfied and reunited with one’s own experiences and one’s own lost selves through an encounter with poems made out of authenticity, wit, intelligence, and generosity. 
—Laura Kasischke  
 
 Let’s say you almost lost your sight but instead you went to the doctor and the procedure saving your vision is so commonplace you wouldn’t even go so far to call it a miracle.  Let’s say that experience was nothing more or less miraculous than having fiercely loved one’s fragile children, or riding a horse in circles around a ring, or buying a ticket to ride in a chair thousands of miles across the sky, or feeding your dying father the single red grape he has been craving. Let’s say you are a poet and rather than dressing up the daily vulnerabilities of addiction, aging, recovery, and fear with poetic devices and rhetorical flares, you used the same tenor and diction you always use to describe your life. Would it be a miracle if those words struck a reader like a hot flash of raw, lyrical intensity and beautiful honesty? Yes, it would be a miracle and also it would be a book, this very one in fact, which you could carry in your pocket and read over and over again, anytime the astonishments of being alive started to wear off.  
 —Kathryn Nuernberger  
 
Dana Roeser is a poet of scrupulous, momentary attention, of emotions that rush at each other from the depths of pathos and the heights of exultation. These emotions do not collide but coexist by virtue of a high colloquial style that seems to move effortlessly from hyperbole to understatement. But make no mistake: as we travel from hairdresser to hospice to dressage ring, a crisis is being braved.  In sixteen elegant, fearless, heartbreaking, and often hilarious poems, Roeser marks the stations of her personal cross. Few poets have set more life in motion and achieved such heroic balance.  All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts is a wonder.
 —Rodney Jones 

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Sample Poem:

MY HOBBY NEEDED A HOBBY
 
 My hobby needed a hobby you know how you get a dog and you have a dog
and then Kurt says we need to get the dog a puppy the dog needs somebody
 
to play with her to teach and then you have a baby bossy baby needs a little
baby and littler baby and then like you have a thing that you don't get paid 
 
any money for it's like an art you do it for the love of it sooner or later
though it gets you know it starts to make you nervous you get caught up
 
in politics it doesn't matter that there's not any money it's prestige 
rankings and who’s up and who’s down so that thing you were calling this
 
vocation the thing you did for art’s sake you know you didn't want
to get paid for because you loved it so much it was like you loved
 
the work it felt like play I mean you looked up after several hours
you were so absorbed you didn’t even know where the time went then it
 
gets onerous because this currency is being traded and you know it is starting
to get heavy it starts to be as heavy as coins people even use expressions
 
like coin of the realm my stock went up or my stock went down or somebody
or other didn't use their political capital all that kind of crap so now
 
your hobby your art needs a hobby that feels completely free and doesn't
have anything to do with the buying and selling attaching your worth to some 
 
chips or tokens markers or whatever so you’ve got to get a new free thing
where you get completely absorbed and work feels like play well so I found
 
one my pet the pet little sister of my first pet is some horses well then I get
to the stable forget about time waste like five hours at a pop after a few years
 
start wearing a watch but am not going to worry yet so I am washing off
Berto the horse that I am helping to pay for but still it feels pretty free I don't
 
go to horse shows I'm like sixty-three years old people consider it a miracle
that I'm even staying on which I'm barely doing my trainer and I spend half
 
the time gossiping to the point where we decide we probably have to go 
to lunch so I am washing Berto off and Berto is starting to squirm a little about
 
his pet out in the pasture he can just make out through the fence I can tell
he has a pet the horses all have buddies his pet is Vinny the donkey and when
 
I went to get him before my lesson he was chasing the red horses because
he thought they were bothering Vinny he does tolerate Love Bug the white pony
 
though because Love Bug is Vinny’s little brother his inseparable companion
his familiar I go to get Berto he’s in a herd of the black horses and one starts
 
to pin its ears and foment a little stampede but I yell my hateful yell and it stops
and Berto walks peacefully to the gate with me he acts sometimes like I’m his buddy
 
which makes me shine all over never mind the transactional aspect the treats and
carrots I’m loaded down with most of the time ban the word “transactional”
 
and also any consideration of the fantasy lovers mine and probably my husband’s
not exactly pets or little brothers the priest tonight said we each have an angel
 
this is really the first I’d heard of it and I started picturing my crush
bathed in light oops no my angel I mean my real one though I don’t think
 
it he she is my pet but more like I'm its I’m surrendered as somebody’s distraction
from their day job their support poodle crossing buddy safe space spice cake