Poetry
Chronic Transience
“This is simply a brilliant book. A necessary book. The artistry is impeccable, but it’s the soul of the thing that makes it so unique. J. Allyn Rosser has every poetic skill: an excellent ear, a sense of form that is both singular and ancient, and a mind alert to both the hilarities and the futilities of life. I find her work delightful, disturbing, and a deep consolation.”
—Christian Wiman
Mimi’s Trapeze
“If John Updike was the Fred Astaire of poetry—nimble, dexterous, witty, graceful—J. Allyn Rosser is the Ginger Rogers—witty, nimble, graceful, seemingly doing it ‘with the greatest of ease,’ as though soaring on a flying trapeze. As they said of Ginger, she could do everything Astaire did, and on high heels and backwards. There’s an element of Erma Bombeck’s sardonic humor in Rosser’s poems, but add to that the graceful, seamless use of rhyme, meter, poetic form, and she has you waltzing from page to page, speaking Tagalog in Manila or ‘wiseguy’ in New York, pirouetting through museums, cemeteries, malls, with odes to loss, failure, futility and break-up that evince just enough metaphysical speculation to make John Donne and Andrew Marvell drool; odes to a comforting, comfortable old shirt, pelicans and Canadian geese, seemingly almost any old things that captures her attention. . . . Rosser is entertaining as hell.”
—Chamber Four
Foiled Again
“A poet on whom precious little is lost, J. Allyn Rosser loves to subject common experiences to an uncommonly intense scrutiny. Getting lost, listening to a Dean Martin song, forgetting a name, encountering a turtle, reading a children’s book—all are studied here in lively, fresh language for clues about the possible truth of life. To read Foiled Again is to be edified and delighted.”
—Billy Collins
New Criterion 2007, winner of the New Criterion poetry prize
Misery Prefigured
“It is Rosser’s splendid articulation that impresses initially, not just that her poems are well written, but that they are so resolutely anchored in the idioms of speech and the necessities of the human heart. She ranges fluently from blues riffs to experimental lyrics and narratives, to formal poems of such confidence that they seem at once ancient and contemporary. And if Rosser cares deeply for balance, not the least pleasure in reading Misery Prefigured derives from a rage so fiercely governed that it puts one in mind of Yeats. I do not know of another poet so unafraid of the rhapsodic and yet so capable of high wit, of addressing the world’s ‘full frontal mundanity.’”
—Rodney Jones
Southern Illinois University Press 2001, winner of the Crab Orchard Award
Bright Moves
“This is a first book of uncommon intelligence and promise. There’s a love of clarity in these poems, a precision, the need to put each word in its proper place. There’s also wit and humor and imagination. It’s not only the truth of experience that poets wish to convey with their stories. They also wish to give pleasure. Bright Moves is a book of many pleasures.”
—Charles Simic
Northeastern University Press 1990, winner of the Morse poetry prize
Recent Poems
Communication – The Cincinnati Review
Hungarian Lesson / Snow Rapture – Plume Poetry
The Central – Plume Poetry
The Five Facets of Love – Slate
Let’s Face the Music and Dance – Slate
As If – Poetry Magazine
Subway Seethe – Poetry Magazine
Since There’s No Time, Let’s Take It / Vestigial – Hudson Review
Pelicans in December – American Life in Poetry
Strange State, Wrong Highway, Cold Night – Slate
Be the Dog – Verse Daily
Equilibrium Update – Verse Daily