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

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 17^th 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