Imitating Light by Roseanna Alice Boswell

We are excited to announce that our newest chapbook, Imitating Light by Roseanna Alice Boswell, has just been released and is available to order! Boswell’s manuscript was the winner of our 2021 Poetry Chapbook Competition, and we’re so excited to share her beautiful work with our readers.

Rebecca Lehmann, author of Ringer, has the following to say about Imitating Light: “Grace and wit suffuse Imitating Light, a joyful, wry, skeptical, wistful and irreverent collection searching for precision in an imprecise world. If home is where the heart is, then, in Imitating Light, home is lost in America, roaming between rural Oklahoma and upstate New York’s farthest northern reaches. Home (and the heart) is lovingly dressing a mannequin. Home is in a bathroom stall. Home is the body itself. Home is a privacy we glimpse for a moment, before it is whisked away again, scattering a trail of pinecone seeds, or are they pomegranate seeds?, to remind us of the way back. Boswell’s poems are smart, ferocious, cunning, philosophical, intuitive, lost, found and altogether bewitching."

Boswell’s striking exploration of home and identity within these poems is powerfully rendered through her use of vivid description and language, as F. Daniel Rzicznek, the author of Settlers, notes: “These poems are clear-eyed, vulnerable, and generous with images and music. Anchored in the deep waters of childhood and family, this chapbook also charts what it means to grow away from origin and find intimacy in another, sharing the attendant questions, anxieties, and pleasures of the pursuit of wholeness in brave confidence with the fortunate reader.” The intimacy Rzicznek identifies within this chapbook is also one that moves beyond the page. Larissa Szporluk, the author of Virginals, praises the sense of vulnerability and connection cultivated in Boswell’s work, stating “a slow-building, deep-seeking communion takes place between what these poems conjure—a love so raw it is primordial—and the state of the reader, which, whatever it was at the onset, quickly becomes smitten, glued to this pained and radiant poetry of a soul who writes in flesh.”

We certainly felt the strength of this intimacy while reading Boswell’s chapbook for the first time, and it’s a strength that does not dissipate over time. As Sporluk notes, “loneliness is Boswell’s muse, and loneliness has made “the windows in her ribs” for us, and we’re right there at the glass, and to read this book is to never want to leave.” We are so pleased to announce that Imitating Light is now available for order—we hope you’ll pick up a copy and linger at these windows alongside us. To order Imitating Light, please visit our shop here.