ROUGH

$21.00

By Nathalie Anderson

“The dead come back so seldom, we / forget how to please them,” Nathalie Anderson writes in her marvelous collection, Rough, whose poems intimate that to be gifted with life is to feel the curse of its final absence. Her poems chronicle how our lives are sometimes fractured and grief-ridden, yet attract us with their propulsive, accentual, brassily syncopated rhythms. It’s almost as if the skaldic versifier in her had risen to proclaim, in words that are often jagged and spiky, the toughness of our existence, but not without giving us the utter pleasure of mouthing the shapes and tonalities of her language, reminding us how even in moments of despair there are enticements to be had, how even as late winter slumps every shrub, bruises every blade, we might still find “moss / already greening: plush archipelagoes down the cracked driveway.” —Gregory Djanikian, Sojourners of the In-Between

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About Nathalie Anderson

Nathalie Anderson won the Washington Prize for her first book, Following Fred Astaire, and her book Stain was selected by Eduardo C. Corral for The Word Works Hilary Tham Capital Collection. Other publications include Crawlers, Quiver, and the chapbook Held and Firmly Bound. Anderson collaborated with Susan Hagen and Lisa Sewell on Birds of North America, and her work has appeared in Atlanta Review, The New Yorker, Nimrod, Plume and others. Also author of five opera libretti, Anderson is retired from Swarthmore College, where she directed the Creative Writing program.

Praise for ROUGH

How does one who has been buffered by friendships go solo into a furious world when the friends die? In Nathalie Anderson’s unforgettable Rough, the vigor and rugged heft of language and intellect take apart the bullies who thrive on division and oppression, stripping strongmen to their essence, “ripped back to [their] core.” Urgent and electric, the poems rise from mourning, probe into discord, and come to uneasy, eloquent rest in song. Like a sonic boom, they will jar you awake. —J. C. Todd, Beyond Repair

Nathalie Anderson’s Rough strikes the keenest of sounds as yet heard in language. One feels an ethical attention to issues but even more importantly to the body’s core pulse. So much of modern life is in these poems: aging, war, the loss of friends – so, too, art, music, and literature. Meditative and discerning, Anderson’s richness of mind and spirit opens pathways. One notices how full the world, how one poet serves as a conduit to our own discoveries. —Major Jackson, Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems 2002-2022

The poems in Rough astonish with their layered resonances across deep pasts and deep futures. From family narratives fractured by loss to the deep wounds of the American South to instructions on packing for the afterlife, Anderson brings her finely tuned ear, her witty linguistic turns, and her rollicking, multitudinous vocabulary to poems of historical depth and emotional range. At a time when we are acutely aware of the ways we carry our personal, ancestral, and national histories with us, these poems remind us that all these forces make a poet’s voice. By turns gut-wrenching and hilarious, Rough is a masterwork. —Kathryn Kirkpatrick, The Fisher Queen: New and Selected Poems

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