My adversary came onto the windowsill of another dream, as a bluebird by Michele Rozga

$19.99

 

In Michele Rozga’s poetry debut, My adversary came onto the windowsill of another dream, as a bluebird, the poet is a female Odysseus trying to find her way home through inquiry, memory and language.  The poems are both contemplative and adventurous as she moves from discussing a 2012 demolition crew in France accidentally destroying a 17th century chateau (particles now in the true marriage/of equals. The bodies of the named/stars—containers for fate and luck—/hovered unhoused over the workers) to poems loosely guided by Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.  In one such poem, Destroy nothing, destroy the most important thing, the author longs to be a holy man, bent on honoring/everything in my path. I would walk and walk, /whisk and whisk, dust flying up, assembling in air/into the shapes of friends, and extinct species, /the screams of the righteous.  These are poems that wrestle with the beauty and horror of the past and present with images of intimacy (Love Songs in War-Time) and a fire that burns through a part of Atlanta called Cabbagetown (Running toward the burning building).  Ultimately, the poet holds onto history while transforming language and living into something both miraculous and metamorphic.

–Sjohnna McCray

 

My adversary came onto the windowsill of another dream, as a bluebird, Michele Rozga’s debut collection, starts with a move and ends with a disappearance, and it is movement—a spirit of questing and questioning—that informs and propels this compelling book of poems.  In fact, the poem at the heart of the book, “To be from somewhere, to say things about that place” suggests a speaker who has lived nearly everywhere. It is perhaps the adaptability to place that allows Rozga such an adventurous, generous eye. Throughout this rich material, Rozga effectively and brilliantly defamiliarizes the familiar.  Rozga’s is a world where a “train station platform” passes for the mind, where “words for joy” are equated with “words for breathing,” where closed doors suggest we do “the hardest…most/impossible” thing.  As I read these complicated, beautiful and wise poems, I feel I am walking in a dreamscape, where the figures are recognizable yet also strangely illusory, where art and life are inextricably entwined, and where reality exists in a liminal space one grounded only and always in sensual lived experience—an experience that opens us to the complicated and miraculous.

Beth Gylys, poet and professor at Georgia State University

 

 

 

Description

My adversary came onto the windowsill of another dream, as a bluebird

by Michele Rozga

$19.99, Full-length, paper

978-1-64662-250-4

2020

This book is a kaleidoscope and travelogue of my life on the stony generous road towards art (lower case “a”, always, for me, in the word art) – art as a form of learning and survival. One poem in this book, a poem about the part of my life I spent in Newport, Rhode Island, called To be somewhere, to say things about that place, expresses the sense of suspension between two worlds that I was trying to capture in the book’s title (which is a line from another poem in the book, a poem about a dream I had about forgiveness). To be somewhere is just the highest swing of a pendulum, and to able to say anything about that place, about being there at that moment, comes in when the movement of the pendulum is suspended in air, right before it tries to swing back down and through equilibrium. The poems in this book have that sort of kinetic energy in them in different ways. Other parts of the traveling ideas in this work, metaphorical or literal, also come from my having grown up in a military family, the child of parents (including a father who served in combat in Vietnam) who each had a Dad in WWII—that family history infuses some of the work in this book, if not always directly via the subject matter. The cover of the book is a photograph I took of a doorway at the Georg Trakl House in Salzburg, Austria, in 2018. He was a lyric poet who died after being wounded in spirit by his experience in WWI, and when I saw the open doorway, it felt like an invitation. I snapped the picture, and forgot about it for a while, and then found it again at the right time.

I went to grad school at Georgia State University in Atlanta, after working in live theater, comedy improv, and modern dance, and just began a job in August of 2017 as an Assistant Professor of English for Norfolk State University. More recent publications include: ‘Ode to Little Houses,’ in the February 2018 anthology Where I Want to Live; In 32 Poems, a May 2017 review of Josephine Yu’s poetry book from Elixir Press, Prayer Book of the Anxious; poems “London Calling,” “Spanish Bombs,” Clash by Night, City Lit Books anthology, May 2015. I live in Norfolk, near where the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean converge, and love to hike, do yoga, spoil cats, take pictures, and paint.

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