A Trapdoor, A Rupture, Something with Kinks by Laurie Rosenblatt

The title itself tells us that this is a remarkable book. Despite all the clever titles that turn up these days, this title stands out for its rhythmic sense of danger. We are warned. And what follows is intense beauty and grief. Collaging her text with quotations, poetry, prose poetry, and  descriptive accounts among the best I  have ever read, Rosenblatt has constructed a close-up view of mental distress, disruption, and deterioration. Most such attempts fail, some even becoming comic. This work speaks the truth—and the horror—and the love that persists through everything.

–Kelly Cherry, author of Twelve Women in a Country Called America: Stories

In A Trapdoor, A Rupture, Something with Kinks, Laurie Rosenblatt brings the shifting spaces of love, family and memory into vivid view. Past and present wrestle for accommodation, devotion and pain are constants, and dementia forges its own savage narrative. This work is a testament to the capacities of the human mind and heart.

–Jacquelyn Pope, Watermark and Hungerpots: Selected and New Poems by Hester Knibbe