She Woke & Rose

Read Maria Takolander's introduction to She Woke & Rose.

ISBN: 9780994259660

She Woke & Roseis an obsession with interiors, an attempt to forge openings, to merge letters as means of release, slowly, slowly feels the longing, the fractures and the loss.

‘When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person’, Emily Dickinson reveals. Here are multiple voices and personas rising and falling after their flowering periods.

Alice Notley stresses that ‘words are one way to get at reality/poetry, what we’re in all the time’. When it comes to my reality and poetry, Inger Christensen’s fourth sequence in Alphabet simultaneously summarises and complicates it all for me:

doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;
killers exist, and doves, and doves;
haze, dioxin, and days; days
exist, days and death; and poems
exist; poems, days, death

To make a stand and push it over, acknowledging the theatrics and violence of it all. I wish to confront rather than confess and as Felicity Plunkett writes it’s ‘when you pin and catch feeling in words / the tissue of its inconstancy / flakes away in your hands.’

–Autumn Royal