In the House| In the Woods by Roseanna Alice Boswell

New Release!!

In the House| In the Woods by Roseanna Alice Boswell
ISBN-13: 978-1943899-21-
Paperback, 66 pages
First Edition, 2024
$15.00 + t/s/h

In the House| In the Woods chronicles grief through forests, down highways, and across state lines, as the speaker remembers and re-constructs their own origin. Core to the poems is a longing for closeness: to the sister who died, and to the siblings who remain. “I will beat the dark this time,” claims the poet, “but still watch for deer / along the side of the road.” Even in hope there is a certain wariness, something lurking among the trees. In the House| In the Woods leads the way back up the horse path toward home, following the last bit of sun.

From the back of the book:
The dreamlike world of these poems is arid and ethereal as the Oklahoma landscape, with language lush as skin and visceral as teeth. The speaker claims: “I have never written an origin story before / That's not true” and goes on to construct a mythology of sisterhood, daughterhood, grief, and patriarchy, where women are reduced and exalted in their bodies, where the bonds between the living and the dead are as delicate and unshakeable as dandelion chains. In the House| In the Woods is an electric new collection by a powerful voice in contemporary poetry.

—Erin Slaughter, author of A Manual for How to Love Us & The Sorrow Festival

Reading Roseanna Alice Boswell’s In the House| In the Woodsis like finding a "clear connection" on the radio after hours of white noise. If you are searching for a house of memory and metamorphosis; if you are trying to locate a woodland of imagery and insight; or if you aim to "find out where we’ve been hiding our throats," look no further. Deftly, gently, Boswell’s tremendous poems offer all this and more. Here is a poet of the body who sings of blood, mortality, and futurity. Here is the poet we’ve been waiting to encounter.

—Ama Codjoe, author of Bluest Nude

Roseanna Alice Boswell is a queer poet and educator from Upstate New York. She earned her MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University and is currently working toward her Ph.D. in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. Her debut poetry collection, Hiding in a Thimble, was released with Haverthorn Press in 2021, and she was the winner of Iron Horse Literary Review’s 2021 Chapbook Competition for her manuscript Imitating Light. Roseanna’s research interests include feminist theory, fat studies, and how these two fields speak to femininity and domesticity. She lives, writes, and teaches in Stillwater, OK, with her husband and their cats.

Read a review by Erin Carlyle in Brown Bag Lit's Milk Journal