Thursday, January 31, 2008

What is J. Allyn Rosser reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: J. Allyn Rosser, whose new collection, Foiled Again, won the 2007 New Criterion Poetry Prize. Her previous books are Misery Prefigured, and Bright Moves. She has received numerous other awards for her work, among them the Morse Poetry Prize, the Peter I. B. Lavan Award for Younger Poets from the Academy of American Poets, the Crab Orchard Award, the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood and Frederick Bock prizes from Poetry, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, the Ohio Arts Council and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She currently teaches at Ohio University.

One paragraph from her entry:
Beside my favorite reading chair, books by three strangely underrated poets: Josephine Jacobsen’s In the Crevice of Time, Chase Twichell’s Dog Language and Claire Bateman’s Clumsy. On the same table is one of those books I can pick up any time and slip inside anywhere, happily: Barbara Hurd’s Stirring the Mud, whose sagacity and refreshing perspective provide great mental ventilation.
Read on to discover Rosser's take on a couple of classic novels, "a very good experimental novel involving Alzheimer’s disease by a Parisian writer," "[o]ne of the very few contemporary poets who can write about political matters unstridently," "an intriguing novella" by a Turkish writer, and one of my favorite novels of last year.

Writers Read: J. Allyn Rosser.

--Marshal Zeringue