Description
Poetry. Women's Studies. The poems in ROSETTA range widely, including subjects such as war and oppression in Eastern Europe, rural life in western Massachusetts, the changing seasons, and the sea. In form, the poet mixes lyric and narrative verse to evoke both the dangerous realities of the world and its glorious beauty.
"The poems of ROSETTA by Karina Borowicz are composed in a rhetoric stripped to the essential and uttered with the disquieting and insistent familiarity of a recurring dream. It is from that compression that the poems derive their strength, and it is that tonal authority that the reader ultimately trusts to navigate the poems' dark and glittering waters. The poetry here is unlike any other. Borowicz is a master of startling insight and control. ROSETTA is a remarkable book."—David Sanders
"Karina Borowicz's poetry is on intimate terms with the natural world and the daily lives of people whose humble possessions often outlast their owners. Never content to paint mere surfaces, Borowicz finds in common things the emblems of an existence hidden to all but the most sensitive observer. In ROSETTA, her gaze takes in overlooked figures and landscapes close at hand—an elderly neighbor, a decaying garden, a crumbling house—then extends to the cosmos, seeking human resonances in the most forbidding places. Movingly and without affectation, wasting neither word nor gesture, she depicts a world where comfort coexists with cruelty: news of beheadings haunts us in our beds, and wheat fields are sown with bodies that 'fall like rags' from a downed airliner. She is mindful of 'the saw blade / of history' but also the way old stories and songs can shape the present and perhaps even 'turn the weather.' This is a poet unafraid to speak with clarity and purpose to a broad audience."—Joshua Coben
Author Bio
Karina Borowicz, a poet and translator, is the author of Proof (Codhill Press, 2014) and The Bees Are Waiting (Marick Press, 2012). Her work has appeared widely in journals, anthologies, and non-print media. Born in historic New Bedford, for five years she taught in Russia and Lithuania. She now makes her home in western Massachusetts.
Author City: SEATTLE, WA USA