Beautiful Motion FROM THE PUBLISHER
NOVEMBER 15, BEFORE THE FROST
That's it, like a light on or a light off, like that tree glorying in the damp coolness out there� you know how they mysteriously brighten in the rain� then shedding, still glorious, while I sweat it out inside then boom the tree is indistinguishable from the others, the yard, the gray sky, leaf rot, no longer standing out.
Dana Roeser grew up in the Philadelphia area and was educated at Tulane University (B.A.), the University of Virginia (M.A., M.F.A.), and the University of Utah. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Northwest Review, Pool, Shade, and others, as well as on Poetry Daily. She has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Ragdale Foundation. She teaches at Butler University in Indianapolis and lives with her husband and two daughters in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Ellen Bryant Voigt teaches in the low-residency MFA Program for writers at Warren Wilson College. She is the author of six books of poems: Claiming Kin, The Forces of Plenty, The Lotus Flowers, Two Trees, Kyrie, and Shadow of Heaven, as well as a collection of essays on poetic craft, The Flexible Lyric.
Most of what these poems record is dilemma: intractable, mistakenly-wished-for, overwhelming, unsolaced by the old Romantic verities extracted from nature or self-awareness. . . . Pricked and pulled by doubt, envy, tenderness, self-critique, grief, and domestic claustrophobia, Roeser's protagonist, like the sly poet herself, seems to defeat convention by earnest failure at it. . . . Yet these accessible, energetic poems are full of quiet insight, usually presented as minor capitulation, major consequences left understated. . . . What reaches the reader's heart�through the ear, as Frost said it would�is tone: varied, candid, pitch-perfect, inscribed by syntax and lineation. In [Roeser's] rich, undeceived catalogs of the world, we hear 'one soul . . . taken by surprise' . . . . Its sounds are indelible."
—from the Foreword
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