Rough

Poetry. Elegant yet down-to-earth, poems of loss and curiosity and love and hope weave together a portrait of life experienced fully, fiercely, and with intention. Anderson's signature combination of profound learning and unpretentious naming of our shared humanity will satisfy the most demanding reader. She asks: How do we respond to the inexorable roughness of the world? The poems in Rough explore that question through sorrow, through witness, and even through snark. From personal bereavement to ecological threat, from the predations of political "strong" men to the manipulations of opportunists hiding behind religiosity, from grief to guilt to ironized affirmation, Rough considers the sorrows that befall us and the sorrows we bring on ourselves--"all that walloping and wailing"--but also our attempts to ameliorate those sorrows, and the process of transforming our realizations of complicity into personal responsibility: what we owe "for being someone in the world."

"Nathalie Anderson's Rough strikes the keenest of sounds as yet heard in language. One feels an ethical attention to issues but even more importantly to the body's core pulse. So much of modern life is in these poems: aging, war, the loss of friends - so, too, art, music, and literature. Meditative and discerning, Anderson's richness of mind and spirit opens pathways. One notices how full the world, how one poet serves as a conduit to our own discoveries."- Major Jackson, Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems 2002-2022

"The poems in Rough astonish with their layered resonances across deep pasts and deep futures. From family narratives fractured by loss to the deep wounds of the American South to instructions on packing for the afterlife, Anderson brings her finely tuned ear, her witty linguistic turns, and her rollicking, multitudinous vocabulary to poems of historical depth and emotional range. At a time when we are acutely aware of the ways we carry our personal, ancestral, and national histories with us, these poems remind us that all these forces make a poet's voice. By turns gut-wrenching and hilarious, Rough is a masterwork." - Kathryn Kirkpatrick, The Fisher Queen: New and Selected Poems