Sarah Rosenthal

Chax Press (2024)

Cover art by Joyce Saler

Available at Chax and SPD

Review copies available from Chax

Cut-up poems using language taken from dreams recorded while undergoing chemotherapy.

Praise for Estelle Meaning Star:

“In Estelle Meaning Star by Sarah Rosenthal, agony has wrenched language apart, decomposing it into lamentation. Dreams recorded during illness are the source for this beautiful and elemental text. Cut, sutured, disassembled, and rearranged, the words haunt the page, inhabiting the contradictory place of both dying and embodiment. As the human and inhuman draw closer together, the figure of Estelle recurs in the text as a sort of aperture between person and star, and that fact that we are made from dying stars takes on full poetic and mythic dimension. This is a searing, brilliant, compassionate dive into the conditions of our existence.” — Camille Roy, author of Honey Mine

“Sarah Rosenthal’s new collection Estelle Meaning Star offers a book-length meditation on mortality, illness, and living on the “rim” of familiar words and worlds. In a moment when the relentless production of public personas and linguistic cliches go hand in hand, Estelle Meaning Star extends a humble and welcoming hand to the silences in public speech while ‘A phrase or sentence/limps toward me/seems to be my/damage dog.’ ‘I’ve thanked/the thin line/that showed skin a world,’ the poet writes, extending that same hand to readers in gratitude for all the ways words can break open.” — Chris Chen, author of Literature and Race in the Democracy of Goods: Reading Contemporary Black and Asian North American Poetry

“Culled from documentations of dreams, Sarah Rosenthal’s language is literally cut and positioned onto a surface, so we see the words as materially figured. The material presencing of words is conjoined to motifs of movement and languages of the body that include an ensemble of relations—of figures to ritual, of pain to the commonplace, of persons to creatures, of living to dying. Rosenthal's subtly startling arrangements of words, lines, and poems evokes choreography, reflecting her authoritative knowledge of movement within twentieth and twenty-first century feminist practices that have revolutionized the social relation to the body in performance arts. Rosenthal brings this vision of movement to her poetics of pain, or “muscle discussion,” in an astonishing and luminous fashion.” — Carla Harryman, author of A Voice to Perform: One Opera / Two Plays

“Peril and transformative magic collide in Sarah Rosenthal’s Estelle Meaning Star. This collection — textured by clipped words and letters that firmly situate the reader on this side of the veil of mortality — thrusts us forward with the intuition of a mind guiding its body to a form of safety. Not unlike how we arrange distant stars into the shapes of constellations, we thread the shifting language and imagery of Rosenthal’s poetry into a journey fit for the heroes of Greek epics, except that, here, we acclaim no hero for their triumph over threat, but for their acceptance of what cannot be conquered. If Estelle means star, it must be the one pointing us north, and I point you to this marvelous book.” — Cortney Lamar Charleston, author of Doppelgangbanger

punctum books (Forthcoming 2024)

Cover art by Jennifer Mack-Watkins

Afterword by Ralph Lemon

Formally inventive, poetic essays that combine investigation of Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti’s work and ideas with the authors’ own experiences of dance. The book includes collaboratively written footnotes between the authors and Rainer that brings her perspective into the text.

Advance Praise:

One Thing Follows Another provides valuable insights into the aesthetic evolution of Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti, two of the major choreographers and thinkers in a postmodern world that would not be the same without them. —Lucinda Childs, Choreographer

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In this innovative and deeply considered essay collection, authors Rosenthal and Witte use both broad strokes and discerning detail to convey the importance of Simone Forti’s and Yvonne Rainer’s work. What’s more, they weave together research with deep introspection to create an intimate, caring connection to these two masters—a utopia often described but rarely enacted, a multi-valve opening of the heart. This book helps us learn the necessary means of our present and future survival: reaching toward each other, touching fingertips, holding hands. —Tracie Morris, author of handholding 5 kinds: on the other hand

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What is freedom? How does a free body move and sound? In One Thing Follows Another, Sarah Rosenthal and Valerie Witte address these questions by pursuing “open awareness” through the art of postmodern visionaries Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer. Freedom is not simple. Forti and Rainer developed an audacious language of unlearning that recognizes oppressive structures; brings mind to the habitual; discovers a vernacular in caged animals, task work, children, chance, collaboration, and the implications of people moving together. The body is the beginning and the limit, “a huge cathedral : filled with space.” Rosenthal and Witte, intrepid explorers, bring this quest to the essay form. This book is kinetic and choreographed. It heaves, races, unfurls, quakes, stops, and somehow even billows. It’s an invitation to the dance. —Robert Glück, author of About Ed

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In One Thing Follows Another, Sarah Rosenthal and Valerie Witte offer us writerly perspectives on movement artists Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti. Here are rich essays of intersection and complexity, essays that interweave the authors’ own experiences as art/life practitioners to understand and nuance the revolutionary aspects of Rainer’s and Forti’s work. Respect and influence move as energetic shuttles through this collection. This book is a site of conversation––of time passing and terms changing, of clarification and memory, of dreams, plays, collage, pedagogy, letters, and poems––all played out against the exhilarating risk of dance in a complex world. —Petra Kuppers, author of Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters

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When I first encountered the work of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer many decades ago, I had no idea what it was about. I began to understand it as non-narrative poetic abstraction. One finds the meaning in themself and experiences reality differently after encountering this work. It is like walking down the street in New York City and seeing a flowerpot fall. The pot explodes onto the sidewalk. Shards fly and dirt scatters like a blast wave. As you approach the point of impact, you see a daisy lying there. You pick it up and take it home. In One Thing Follows Another, Witte and Rosenthal create this experience anew, translating Forti’s and Rainer’s ideas about movement onto the medium of the page. Even readers who think they already know the way these choreographers work will feel the shock wave. And then see the daisy. Pick it up. Take it home. —Yoshiko Chuma, Artistic Director, The School of Hard Knocks, 1980–present

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I thank Valerie Witte and Sarah Rosenthal for supporting the important work of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer through their probing study, One Thing Follows Another. I developed my own work alongside Forti and Rainer and recall many of the events retold in these pages. The main paradigms explored by the authors are as important today as they were then. We face a world verging on disembodied culture. Without these works and this fine book to help us, we run the risk of reinventing the wheel. —Alison Knowles, Founding Member, Fluxus Movement

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In One Thing Follows Another, authors Rosenthal and Witte combine musings and memories with research to dynamically interact with the work of Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti, capturing the energy of the choreographers’ personalities and work in the process. We get to know Forti’s tone of voice along with whatever we may already know of her dancing. Rainer’s emphatic redefinition of virtuosity (“…had nothing to do with feminism!”) sits alongside the (unabashedly feminist) authors’ experiences of teaching and dancing, creating a sense of inclusiveness and permission—we don’t have to agree in order to inhabit a stage or a page together. We are taken by Rainer’s offer to trust that the pre-work can be part of the work-work, to note how we frame this dancing we love. Inspiring! I feel the jolt myself––the urge to get up from my desk and dance, noting what I as mover, maker, and thinker carry from the past and what I begin now. The invitation to inhabit our bodies just as they are, “judgments checked at the door,” is too delicious to pass up. —Bebe Miller, Choreographer and Artistic Director, Bebe Miller Company

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Via innovation and collaboration, Sarah Rosenthal’s and Valerie Witte’s boundary-defying collection refigures writing about dance. Even as they conjure the transformative powers of transmission from one generation of artists to the next, they document the ever-elusive nature of performance and practice, recognizing “what it means to be an artist who wants and needs to morph their thinking over time.” One Thing Follows Another honors its central subjects, Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti, while opening the field of the essay to what grid, gesture, and syllable make possible. —Karla Kelsey, author of On Certainty

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In One Thing Follows Another, Rosenthal and Witte find visceral, evocative ways to explore the herstories of Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti. Embodying the spirit and approach of these choreographers and their teacher/mentor Anna Halprin, the authors take us on a personal/artistic/political/herstorical dance with words that had me laughing, crying, and recognizing evocations of the Halprin Studio then and our life/art work over time. One note follows another, one piece of masterful research follows another in this stunning score-eography. You will be swept up by it––and learn a lot along the way about incredible women making a new movement that continues to impact us. —Daria Halprin, Co-Founder, Tamalpa Institute

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One Thing Follows Another is both a celebration of the postmodern dance choreographers Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer and an investigation into the social and cultural implications of their work. Drawing from autobiography, dance scholarship, memoir, poetry, and continental philosophy, Witte and Rosenthal track their own encounters with the performances and reflections of Forti and Rainer, deploying the liberatory feminism implicit in the choreographers’ work to explore familial (Rosenthal’s wedding), social (homelessness), and cultural (the musical Pippin) “dance” performances. At the core of these essays is the female body’s objecthood as defined by ballet and certain modes of modern dance, and its eventual freeing from professionalism thanks to the pioneering work of Forti, Rainier, and their peers. At the authors’ invitation, the two choreographers, especially Rainer, push back against some of the authors’ conclusions, and their emendations make One Thing Follows Another a four-way conversation about our bodies and what it means to move through private and public spaces. —Tyrone Williams, coauthor of washpark

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Infusing academic research with a spirit of experimentation and play, Sarah Rosenthal and Valerie Witte immerse themselves in the complexity of Simone Forti’s and Yvonne Rainer’s iconic works. The authors employ multidisciplinary methodologies and intersubjective experiences, with the footnote exchanges between them and Rainer offering intimate insight. Ranging from the scholarly to the deeply personal, these essays inform, perplex, inspire, and challenge us to dive into the unknown and find our own way, as did the innovative pioneers Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer. —Donna Uchizono, Artistic Director, Donna Uchizono Company

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One Thing Follows Another is more than a collection of essays about two singular artists whose radical ideas forever changed the discipline of dance. This book is an exploration of the way reality unfolds and evolves in unexpected ways, in the lives of Forti and Rainer, of Rosenthal and Witte––and of myself. So many instances in my reading of this strangely beautiful book brought me to my own stories, held in my body, waiting. These essays reaffirmed one thing I learned from the Postmodernists––that time is not linear. Neither is the intricate, strong yet vulnerable writing within this book. One thing may follow another but not in any predictable way; experience spirals and returns, suddenly rediscovered. Truly an inspiring adventure. —K.J. Holmes, Independent Dance Artist

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In One Thing Follows Another, Rosenthal and Witte reveal and revel in the seams of process, articulating and inspiring the role of relationship—those multivalent collaborations of ongoingness between the self and other artists at the intersection of various disciplines, narratives, and creative lineages. Engaging the work and lives of Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti, the authors employ chance, experimentation, and desire as compositional tools for immersion in the “exquisite and ordinary.” Part poetics, part biography, part ontological inquiry, this book includes dreams, erasures, chance encounters, poetry, creative prompts, letters, interviews, and performance/procedure descriptions that unfetter prescribed boundaries between process, rehearsal, performance, and “real” life. This accomplished and visionary book allows us to think, feel, and play our way toward curious relationality, embodying the authors’ keen urging for immersive praxis and inviting us to enter the text as “a dance floor … potentially, ostensibly, for wild abandon.” —Serena Chopra, Interdisciplinary Artist

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These stunningly written essays interweave the authors’ own lived experiences with an examination of Forti’s and Rainer’s work––its history and contemporary relevance. As Witte and Rosenthal explore these avant-garde artists’ contributions across disciplines and movements including feminism, Fluxus, and Happenings, they create a quilt of multiple colors and textures, layered with meaning and leading to revelatory and deeply provocative discoveries. To borrow the authors’ description of these artists’ work, this book “holds up a loving mirror that invites us to inhabit our bodies and daily lives fully.” —Margaret Jenkins, Founder and Artistic Director, Margaret Jenkins Dance Company

Drop Leaf Press (2022)

Cover art by Maude Tanswai

Available at Drop Leaf Press

Poetry.

Praise for we could hang a radical panel of light:

“Sarah Rosenthal’s we could hang a radical panel of light embodies the visibility of the poetic process, in which the tangible and intangible are held in counterbalance. Words and phrases from Rosenthal’s dream journal have been broken apart, rearranged, and placed by hand on the page, each cut-out white rectangle becoming its own panel of light. The compositional practice of collage builds a tenuous sense of structure and evokes a shifting subjectivity, a revolving, scintillating sense of meaning. ‘Estelle,’ ‘she,’ and ‘I’ are all points in a constellation of a self grappling with pain and identity as they mirror, overlap, and depart from one another, traversing the vast space in which each panel has been carefully affixed.” — Jill Tomasetti

In Sarah Rosenthal’s chapbook We Could Hang a Radical Panel of Light, the reader is offered the opportunity to view the manual labor behind making cut-up and collaged poems from a dream journal. Black text on a white background affixed to a gray page creates little rectangular light boxes, illuminating the poet’s tactile and associative compositional process. The composition itself is lyric and elegiac. At its center is a “self / positioning,” figuring out “how to / squeeze into language.” This “implies trauma.” The reader is addressed directly by “Estelle meaning star,” though others or other aspects of Estelle— “I” and “she”— contribute to the conversation from “broken down / years.” Foremost here seems to be a “child… / en route to woman,” experiencing “a pain that stretches the length of a body” or “one hundred fifty / … years.” The spare, pressured composition matches well with concerns about female identity and pain. The composition emits a quality of the embodied and disembodied; though words have been affixed to pages and fixed in space, meaning and definitions are in transit. For Estelle, “who dots the sky,” we are her observers. We witness how “night’s / middle daughter / disperses” and is given “a new name.” To read Rosenthal’s chapbook-length poem is to remind us that “the / dreams we have / [are] divining rods.” — Jami Macarty

above / ground press (2021)

Cover art by Amy Fung-yi Lee

Available at above / ground

Essay / Poetry. Through a series of letters addressed to Rainer, the text explores her innovative blend of pedagagy and choreography, folding in my experiences as a performer and educator and reflections on other creators who challenge the distinction between art and life: Renee Gladman, Bernadette Mayer, and Leslie Scalapino.

Poetry and letters engaging the work of choreographers Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti. A collaboration with Valerie Witte.

The Operating System (2019)

Cover art by Heidi Reszies

Available at Bookshop.org, Indiebound, Barnes & Noble

Excerpt here

Full text here

Praise for The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow:

Witte and Rosenthal approach the linked figures of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer from multiple viewpoints, and indeed from different attitudes toward dance itself—rather like the attraction and repulsion anyone sensible feels toward this energy. Witte resents dance’s powers of exclusion, while Rosenthal responds to its open invitation, and they debate these positions with extreme generosity, each taking the other into account and tracking her through question, dare, a step forward, two steps back, across the lines of geography and social system. Just when you think you’ve got them placed, the book comes to a shattering close. But don’t worry, folks, Rosenthal and Witte keep dancing with the work of Rainer and Forti ... this party’s just getting started.—Kevin Killian

Chax Press (2016)

Cover art by Cynthia Miller

Available at Chax and SPD

Poetry. Lizard blends aspects of contemporary womanhood with facts about various lizard species to question what it means to be a human at this historical moment, in relation to other humans, other species, and the planet.

Praise for Lizard:

"In Lizard, Rosenthal explores the creaturely membranes that lie between the known-social and the unknown-social. When racified nations, nationified peoples, and “self-evident” identities of every make threaten to squash the efflorescence of Life’s lusty reach toward the stars, Lizard is born and scampers about. But Rosenthal’s sense of Fable eschews morals and maxims in favor of claiming a terrain from which the Para-Human can come into being. Slowly, tentatively, and then brashly, Lizard begins to obverse the world (while keenly observed herself). The resulting Kabbalistic strokes are as patently hilarious as they are intelligently perplexing. This is bone instructive poetry. I love it."  — Rodrigo Toscano

"Never the jarring ding of a carriage return in Rosenthal's latest; rather, Lizard continuously pivots, knitting each poem onto its previous row of stitches. You'll stay upright in these candid yet lyric lines, but prepare to careen between Self and (slithery) Other until your wobbles start to wibble. Scared? When danger's on its way, what do you do? Lizard 'pours/ her flesh into/ purchased beige,/ becomes a/ dish too ugly/ to taste.' Wouldn't you?"  —Amy King

“'How does/ a lizard sing?' Rosenthal’s poem asks, long after it has answered—with a series of tight, deft ventures into the gestural world of the lacertilia, 'Sluggish at dawn,/ brutal at noon.' 'Study the other,' the poem commands, including self as other '—Throw "she"/ in there and Lizard/ immediately thinks it’s/ her.' In coexistence with 'other' genders, other animals, and especially with other words, Lizard flashes 'fabulist mail' at every turn, in surprising captures. Lizard owns categories ('When you stop/ the pronouns/ explode') but categories evaporate as the poem works at 'unimagining' Lizard, asking, 'Is lizard nature?' A delightful dream song, a tour de force in narrow measures. 'Her sudden/ form defines the zero/ point I so adore.'"  —Jonathan Skinner

Reviews:

"Lizard is quick, slick, smart, funny, and elusive. I found Rosenthal’s voice engaging and her sense of poetic craft impressive. Whether you see the book as many mini poems or one long poem, the slithery-ness of self and society, abstraction and animal, has hardly been easier to enjoy." —from Dean Rader’s review at Kenyon Review

"…conscious of the meditative aspect of blank space on the page, Rosenthal’s communion with that silence is her communion with her reader and nature in a transmission of poetic mysticism." —from Nicholas Leaskou’s review at Tarpaulin Sky Press

"…the sumptuousness of Lizard, the complexities of a being not you, the exploratory wildness of pulling-back-the-palm-fronds, peering through the undergrowth and basking in the feeling of forgetting your self." —from Jamie Felton’s review at Lightning’d Press

"Utilizing the lizard as part character and part spirit-animal for the poems, she is able to write through fact, fable and metaphor..." —from rob mclennan’s review at Small Press Book Review

"Lizard is seriously intelligent poetry mirroring a distorted world. Metaphorically inked poems one can read over and over and each time they change color. It all seems so effortless and not a syllable wasted. Quite as succinct and deep as T.S. Eliot (sans the pomposity). I've never read poems this original and haunting. Great stuff!" —from Peter Byrne’s review at Amazon

Spuyten Duyvil Press (2009)

Cover photograph by Yedda Morrison

Available at Spuyten Duyvil

Multi-genre (prose-poem-like fiction, lineated poems, dream matter, and art reviews). The story of a young woman coming of age in New York City.

Praise for Manhatten:

"This is not the mythic Manhattan of bright lights and glitz. It is called Manhatten and it is wonderfully out of kilter. In this mixed-genre book (fiction, poetry, review), Sarah Rosenthal layers headlong, voice-driven prose with silent, otherly poems to tell a story of an island where relationships are disturbed yet meaningful and luminous."  —Juliana Spahr

"Proudly misspelled, Manhatten chronicles the adventures of a young woman as she searches for her life story in the ultimate American metropolis. The heroine—who may or may not be author Sarah Rosenthal—leads the reader into one scene after another filled with family, friends, chance acquaintances, exes, and current love interests, where relationships and geography intertwine and memories collect on every street corner. As keen and insistent as the city it describes, this writing attains a clarity fueled by hunger for insight and language's tonal responsiveness. Spanning two coasts, leaping whole decades in a single clause, Manhatten documents the rush of events and the meditative spaces between, negotiating a life complete with all its enchantments, illusions, intersections, and collisions."  —Pamela Lu

"I like Sarah Rosenthal's Manhatten because it's generous with self. Also alarmingly well written. And best of all, Manhatten awkwardly and beautifully makes the claim that heterosexuals are human too!"  —Eileen Myles

Reviews:

"It is rare to see a written work so perfectly depict the way memory functions."  —from Delia Tramontina’s review at Galatea Resurrects

"A triumph of New Narrative."  —from Kevin Killian’s review at Amazon

"City and author encounter one another on the page, digest one another, reshape one another in their own respective images. That point of mutual creation is precisely where the blank side of the page shows through, where the sidewalk dissolves into sky."  —from Jay Thomas’s introduction for a reading at Small Press Traffic

Dalkey Archive Press (2010)

Available at Dalkey Archive

Interviews. Fills a major gap in contemporary poetics, focusing on one of the most vibrant experimental writing communities in the nation. It features internationally respected writers Michael Palmer, Nathaniel Mackey, Leslie Scalapino, Brenda Hillman, Kathleen Fraser, Stephen Ratcliffe, Robert Gluck, and Barbara Guest, and important younger writers Truong Tran, Camille Roy, Juliana Spahr, and Elizabeth Robinson. The writers discuss vision and craft, war and peace, race and gender, individuality and collectivity, and the impact of the Bay Area on their work. The book’s introduction places the interviews within the context of the history of experimental writing.

Praise for A Community Writing Itself:

“Sarah Rosenthal's interviews with some of the most engaging and important American poets of the time, all working in the Bay Area, provide vivid commentary on the state of the art and some of the most useful commentary available on the work of each individual writer.”  —Charles Bernstein

“An extraordinary compendium of close engagement with the writing, ethos, and practice of a number of poets who are in situ in the Bay Area, one of the most historically fertile grounds for experimental poetry for a great number of decades. It’s where the Beat literary movement burst upon the Culture at large, and the New American Poetry and its legacies became a cohesive literary ‘outrider’ force. The current poetics community is just as radically potent and individually active, forging new syntaxes and a ‘new company of voices,’ as Michael Palmer puts it. Considerations of history, politics, psychology, spirituality, identity, gender, media, chance operation, performance, and community keep the discourse lively and relevant. This is an invaluable resource of ‘deep talk’ for writers, scholars, and fans alike. Hats off to Sarah Rosenthal who has kept track and asked the provocative questions.”  —Anne Waldman

“What Steve Abbott and Bruce Boone achieved with the Left/Write Unity Conference in early eighties San Francisco, bringing together differing groups of poets, Sarah Rosenthal thankfully reenacts in her collection of interviews with Bay Area writers. In A Community Writing Itself twelve poets serving various poetics, from Language writing to New Narrative, are allowed to break consensus regarding the notion of a singular development of shared ambitions. As approaches to the politics of writing are individually charted, connections and communities unfold. If one is interested in the evolution of American poetry since 1950, it is necessary to engage these conversations.”  —Claudia Rankine

"Sarah Rosenthal's teleological study of Bay Area poetics, in the form of a liquid, prickly conversation, manages to delight its reader at the same time that it generates a new set of obsessions. A poetry 'expressed in color.' The moment when 'what seemed impossibly strange becomes less so—sometimes anyway.' How an alphabet might 'unbraid' itself, which isn't 'metatext.' It's sudden and overwhelming knowledge about what 'the end of the poem' might bring. See: Agamben via Hoodoo via a 'secret autobiography.' In its exploration of intersections of experimental writing community, feminine monstrosity and 'horny' form—at least, that's where my reading ran a series of red lights—Rosenthal's book is a delicious graft of thinking and writing, performed just outside the safety zone of transcription. You can't go wrong with the most intense form of banter: 'turning about with,' from the Latin root conversationem, 'others.'"  —Bhanu Kapil

Reviews:

“…A Community Writing Itself is destined to remain a major text for those wishing to know about Bay Area vanguard writing.”  —from Mark Wallace’s review at Jacket2

“I’ve always been taken with any version of literary local histories and archival projects, so … A Community Writing Itself … is certainly a revelation.” —from rob mclennan’s review on his blog

“...how I envy the poets who got to sit down and glory in all those sharply focused, attentive and ultimately liberating questions she asks.”  —from Kevin Killian’s review at Attention Span

“…Rosenthal’s introductory history is superb…” —from Ron Silliman’s review on his blog

“One feels secure not only by her knowledge, but also her respect for the interviewee, along with the enthusiasm she sustained over nearly a decade of research and writing—all of which makes the ripostes a pleasure to read.”  —from Joel Weishaus’ review on his blog

“Rosenthal is the quiet force, farmer and harvester, of this abundant book. ... She's informed, smart, probing, empathetic. ”  —from Richard Silberg’s review at Poetry Flash

Dusie Press (2011).

Poetry and visual art. A collaboration with artist Amy Fung-yi Lee. Reproduced online at Dusie.

Reviews:

“…the overall poem presents a construct where we move back and forth between the observing eye to the lyricism of the speaker’s narrative story; the hook is in the exchange as we ponder who the animals are and what is being made metaphor in this poem’s universe.”  —from Megan Burns’ review at Drunken Boat

“Rosenthal … seems interested in the book as unit of composition, writing out longer sequences that collage themselves into being, and into a kind of structural and thematic unity...”  —from rob mclennan’s review at his blog

a+bend press (2000)

Poetry. Comprises five poems: “Religiosity,” “they squeeze us together in here,” “i–iv,” “the book of ruth day,” and “sitings.”

Review:

“Like her 1999 book, not-chicago (Melodeon), Rosenthal's Sitings is populated by stray voices, odd figures, alien subjects whose presence fascinates us not because of the way they live (we don't know how they live) but because of the things they say. It's also possible that no one speaks, that language doesn't speak, that the speech act itself is speaking instead.”  —from Jono Schneider’s review at VeRT

Melodeon Poetry Systems (1998)

Poetry.

Review:

“This beautiful chapbook is a triumph of form.”  —from Jono Schneider’s review in Lyric& #7

Margin to Margin Press (2001)

Fiction. Comprises two interlocking stories, “she—about whom” and “How I Wrote This Story.” Winner of the Leo Litwak Fiction Award.