All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts (price includes shipping)
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BY DANA ROESER
WINNER OF THE 2017 TWO SYLVIAS PRESS WILDER SERIES POETRY 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
