Today’s GalleyCrush is Patrick Rosal’s The Last Thing: New & Selected Poems, forthcoming from Persea Books on September 21, 2021.
Perfect pitch: “Bursting with music, infused with love and awe, this is essential reading from a poet of vigor and conscience.”
First lines: “Boys don’t read. / —the experts // These kids run / their sloppy fly routes // right to left / in a crabgrass park.”
Book buzz: “I read these poems aloud to change the air in my room, to alter my mood. What a gift to be reminded of the capacity for song in every breath.” —Jamila Woods
Book notes: Hardcover, poetry, 224 pages.
Cover credit: Mark Rosal with Rita Lascaro.
Author bio: Patrick Rosal is an interdisciplinary artist and author of four previous books, most recently Brooklyn Antediluvian (Persea Books, 2016), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. He has earned fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Senior Research Program. He is a professor of English and the inaugural codirector of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University–Camden.
