“When I first encountered the story poems of Roze & Blud, I didn’t know what to think, but the shock of recognition I felt when listening to its working-class speakers, the joy—and envy—I felt hearing them speak, believing and not believing that Iwen could craft beauty, create mystery, and evoke genuine wonder from the stuff of these peoples’ lives! Well, it made this working-class-girl-turned-poet weep with happiness, with sorrow over what should have been for Iwen’s characters, and most of all, it renewed my faith in the heart and art of poetry.”
—Kathy Fagan, author of Sycamore
“Roze & Blud is a dialogue of body and soul in gendered and sexual longing, sometimes bitter-funny bildungsroman, ‘silently bleeding in World History,’ then increasingly PTSD humans-compelling-themselves-to-live. Jayson Iwen brings a voice like W. H. Auden’s into trailer parks, war-torn grief, and human love in bodies that are ‘soft beds / where bullets went to sleep.’ A seriously delicate range of sorrowing beauties—and a hard look at America’s state—rage in this tender book.”
—Lisa Samuels, author of The Long White Cloud of Unknowing
“The poems in Roze & Blud so clearly capture life in the Twin Ports that the characters within them seem to be manifestations of the place itself. Roze Mertha and William Blud rise up, poem by poem, remarkable as people and the perfect vessels to deliver Iwen’s profound philosophies. The great discoveries here feel effortless in the presence of these two, Roze and William, two of the ‘Earth’s / many selves, rushing forward into life.’”
—Ryan Vine, author of To Keep Him Hidden and Distant Engines