Aurelia (2020)

Coming from a lonely girlhood, Aurelia questions everything. The why of girl, first loves, eating disorders, taking up space, and learning how to be anything at all. These poems contemplate the human condition and capture the endless curiosity that Rosen feels about her friends and strangers that she meets.

Like Sylvia Plath, Angel Rosen’s poetry is a joy to read in spite of its inherent sadness. Rosen’s poetry collection, Aurelia, which is named after Sylvia Plath’s mother, begins with the birth of a baby who will never truly feel like they fit into our damaged but beautiful world. Poems like “The Wild” will lift the unease of angst with language through use of clever play on words. Throughout the book the author asks, “what are women for?” and looks for the answers in a myriad of ways, both celebrating womanhood and detailing its struggles. This is the kind of confessional poetry that illuminates the dark paths of coming of age and coming out. Aurelia is a map that guides the reader to a place of survival. Read it closely to return to a home where, “all of [your] pulses belong to [you].”  —Sean Lynch, Founding Editor of Serotonin Press.

Aurelia on Amazon – Aurelia on Goodreads – Available Monthly at The Soft Spot on Penn Avenue

Blake (2022)

Blake evolves from Aurelia, its sister collection, thus completing the journey to finding joy in chosen family and accepting the reality of grief as it happens. Facing the finality of mental illness, choosing to live or die, and creating poems that contemplate all of the possibilities on both sides of survival. These poems demand the space they take up. A little girl who lived to be twenty-nine. What’s next?

First, Blake is a fist. Then, an inevitable winter. Then, the cruel comicality of a negligent God. The poems in this collection are locked in something less like a boxing match, more like a streetfight — desperate, feral, and up against opponents whose enormity threatens to swallow them — but Rosen is not to be overtaken. She holds her ground in this relentless and swift-weaving fury of jabs. In her sophomore outing, Rosen is equal parts open wound & studied observer, suffering the blows of ostracization only to turn on her tortures, wielding a mirror like a knife. She`s forging gold armor of wit and self-mythologization. She`s brawling in the pit of the crucible that made her, laughing, and clawing back out. To experience Blake is to punch back at every rage, every grief, every ache that has ever clenched you, and to look each in the eye as you do. —Amy Jannotti, editor-in-chief of BLEATING THING MAGAZINE and author of Angels & Insects are Creatures with Wings.

She’s a poet, she’s a storyteller. In this collection of stunning, heartbreaking pieces, Angel Rosen writes of love, loss, hope, and powerful resilience. She writes unflinchingly with clarity and heart and leaves you haunted by her surprising, revelatory connections. What I love most about each poem in BLAKE is that Rosen shows us what she adores most: rediscovering and redefining the power of a single word.—Jolene McIlwain, author of SIDLE CREEK, an NPR and Library Journal best book of the year.

Blake on Amazon – Blake on Goodreads – Available Monthly at The Soft Spot on Penn Avenue