Synopses & Reviews
Review
"...Rosen takes us back "to the beautiful leafy Bronx," and to "Yonkers, our Bride of / Winter cloaked in ermine / and didn't we feel rich /everything clean and gleaming?" The poems don't merely describe a childhood, a life, but take us there. I found myself nodding, murmuring "yes," even though on the surface, my life would seem to have little in common with the life of a Jewish girl in the big city. Lois Rosen is that rare writer who not only makes you feel you know the girl, the woman in her poems, but that you are that girl, that woman. She approaches the most difficult subjects with an almost feathery touch: the holocaust weaves ever so quietly through poems such as
The Living Language, which describes the joys of summer camp while honoring "those old-fashioned coats / reaching the ground / those captives....rounded up / shaved bald / naked." The poems dealing with her parents' decline and death are some of the book's strongest. I am especially moved by
Pumpkin Carving, a deceptively simple pair of poems where she matter-of-factly describes her father's face literally disappearing with cancer: "When they cut / cancer from / a face, food falls / from the mouth" and the diminishing of her mother's life as her mind is besieged by dementia in
Blizzard II: "This year a blizzard storms behind her eyes. / Until recently I would have said / She knows me, but now brakes won't grip. / The car ahead spins on ice as if demented."
If you want poems with heart and honesty, poems full of sly humor, poems that pay careful attention to the past without lapsing into sentimentality, pick up a copy of Pigeons." Toni Van Deusen, Lane Literary Guild Newsletter
About the Author
Lois Rosen's collection of poetry, Pigeons, is her first book. Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including Calyx, Hubbub, Northwest Review, and Willow Springs, and received numerous awards, including first place in the Oregon Teachers as Writers Contest and in the Oregon State Poetry Association Poet's Choice Contest. She has served as co-director for the Oregon Writers' Project Advanced Institute at Willamette University. Rosen grew up in Yonkers, N.Y., and has lived for many years in Salem and is recently retired from teaching English as a Second Language at Chemeketa Community College.