At First & Then

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. AT FIRST & THEN is radical, beautiful, propulsive. An Orphic tale of a body descending then rising again, the debut chapbook from poet Danielle Rose charts woven stories of addiction, grief, trauma, and, ultimately, gender--the essential pieces of personhood. Through struggle and loss, the poems in AT FIRST & THEN proceed like timid ghosts learning how to form language, gathering the disparate elements of selfhood into a warm coherency, a radical self-permission.

Rose writes the language of longing with a fierce acuity, but this is also a collection about fulfillment. In both there is dancing, Rose's speaker says of the motion of the tides and of welcoming the divine. These are poems brimming with motion, with hunger, and with aching, full-bodied joy. This must be how / we can bear to be so empty / so we can be so full.

AT FIRST & THEN is a transition narrative, but not in the ways it is expected to be. Instead, charting a kind of transition along parallel lines of gender, addiction, grief, trauma, and a shifting sexuality. Rose deftly writes through a range of interdisciplinary lenses--cartography, cooking, philosophy, linguistics, anatomy, ornithology, and more--toward a new understanding of a changing self. The end result is a panoramic portrait of the speaker-subject rendered in frantic syntax and with striking lyrical precision. Each poem laced with loss and intimately aware of 'how loss reveals a new language.' Page by page, Rose guides the reader deeper into the uncharted and shadowy corners of this language, but warns us 'that poetry is not light--& that we do not need / another word for empty.'--torrin a. greathouse

Danielle Rose is a poet who keeps her eye close to the ground in which we are raised--close to the categories which define (and often displace) us. To the extent that the feminine is reclaimed, analogies from nature are used to reveal or subvert finality, as in the migration patterns of mourning doves, the 'toward or away, ' the incessant motion. As Rose notes, the tools we have are insufficient--the body map, itself, 'a violence.' I could not put this book away, and I will never forget it.--Alina Stefanescu