Roseanna Alice Boswell
Poet | Feminist | Librarian

“Grace and wit suffuse Imitating Light, a joyful, wry, skeptical, wistful and irreverent collection searching for precision in an imprecise world. If home is where the heart is, then, in Imitating Light, home is lost in America, roaming between rural Oklahoma and upstate New York’s farthest northern reaches. Home (and the heart) is lovingly dressing a mannequin. Home is in a bathroom stall. Home is the body itself. Home is a privacy we glimpse for a moment, before it is whisked away again, scattering a trail of pinecone seeds, or are they pomegranate seeds?, to remind us of the way back. Boswell’s poems are smart, ferocious, cunning, philosophical, intuitive, lost, found and altogether bewitching."

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- Rebecca Lehmann, author of Ringer

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"'Trust the reader,' writers are always advising one another, but in Imitating Light, Roseanna Boswell spellbindingly enacts and upends this cliche literally and lyrically in poems that rescue self and body from a society and culture hungry to critique, ridicule, and devalue. She liberates them not in her own interest (these poems aim far beyond the confessional), but for the sake of her readers' selves, her readers' bodies. These poems are clear-eyed, vulnerable, and generous with images and music. Anchored in the deep waters of childhood and family, this chapbook also charts what it means to grow away from origin and find intimacy in another, sharing the attendant questions, anxieties, and pleasures of the pursuit of wholeness in brave confidence with the fortunate reader.

 

- F. Daniel Rzicznek, author of Settlers

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"The dominant effect of Imitating Light is the intimacy of it. A slow-building, deep-seeking communion takes place between what these poems conjure—a love so raw it is primordial—and the state of the reader, which, whatever it was at the onset, quickly becomes smitten, glued to this pained and radiant poetry of a soul who writes in flesh. Loneliness is Boswell’s muse, and loneliness has made 'the windows in her ribs' for us, and we’re right there at the glass, and to read this book is to never want to leave."

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- Larissa Szporluk, author of Virginals

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