ABOUT THIS BOOK

Charting a journey through schoolyards and laundromats, suburban gardens and rice paddies, yoga studios and rural highways, Michelle Brittan Rosado crafts poems that blend elegy and praise. In settings from California to Malaysian Borneo, and the wide Pacific between them, she explores themes of coming-of-age, mixed-race identity, diaspora, and cultural inheritance. With empathy for the generations past, she questions how we might navigate our history to find a way through it, still holding on to the ones we love. Like an ocean wave, these poems recede and return, with gratitude for the quotidian and for beauty found even in fragments.

bring me back

to the in-between

where my breath

has always lived,

without containment,

like two legs pointing

toward the ocean, or these arms

reaching into sky

—excerpt from "Ode to the Double 'L'" Michelle Brittan Rosado. All rights reserved.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Michelle Brittan Rosado is the author of the poetry collection Theory on Falling into a Reef. She is pursuing her doctorate in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California.

REVIEWS

"Strikes just the right, clear note to place in the register of memorable debuts. Rosado's terrific new poems are salve and honey, even when the subjects of breaking and coming apart are at their beautiful core. Listen to the brilliant music of these pages." —Aimee Nezhukumatathil, contest judge

"Exhilarating, tactile poems—embodied, rich and full. Michelle Brittan Rosado is a visionary architect building and following interior maps within intricate landscapes, creating luminous revelation and deep calm. A book like this gives you your life back." —Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Voices in the Air

"The sense of a divided homeland—California and Malaysia—first splits then doubles the impassioned focus of these precisely crafted, complexly braided meditations on the self and family inheritance. Psychologically searing and yet always resonant with the world's pleasures, these poems unfold as an album of belated and tender homecomings." —David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Ode to the Double “L”

I
Western History
Pastoral with Restless Searchlight
How to Use Microsoft Paint to Alter a Birth Certificate
Only Child
Ambivalence
Dementia
Across the Street from Foxboro Elementary School, an Inmate Escapes California State Prison Solano
Vanishing Ship
The Elements Have Learned to Speak
Theory on Falling into a Reef
Customs
Between
Poem for My Twin
Our Bodies Were Once the Color of Our Masks
The Hotel Eden
Asking about My First Name
Debt
Poem for My Mother
Rootless
My Father’s Work
The Sky Will Look White
Pantun
Poem for My Maternal Grandfather
Ritual
Photograph Taken by My Paternal Grandmother on Her Honeymoon, 1944
Elegy without Translation
My Dead Live in Two Rooms

II
The Dissolution Paperwork Asks if I Need to Restore My Name
Late Summer
Sea Shanty for the Divorced
The Numerology of Us
Old Knives
The Tower District
This Poem Wants to Be a House
Fresno Laundromat without Air-Conditioning in Late July
Contemporary Artifacts
Portrait of His Ex-Lover at a Yoga Studio, Downtown Fresno
Incident between Two Exits
Why Can’t It Be Tenderness
The Sweetest Exile Is the One You Choose
A Name Made of Asterisks
Mistaken Ode
Love after Dentistry
On Waking When You’re Already Leaving
While You Are Gone
An anchor in the shape of an ampersand
Visitations with Unmarried Self
Glaucoma Test in the Post-Racial Era
Breaking a Sugar Bowl the Morning after a Lunar Eclipse
Lullaby in Which It Becomes Impossible Not to Talk about Race

Notes

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