Winner of the Fall 2019 Black River Chapbook Competition
at first & then
is radical, beautiful, propulsive. An Orphic tale of a body descending then rising again, the debut chapbook from poet Danielle Rose charts woven stories of addiction, grief, trauma, and, ultimately, gender— the essential pieces of personhood. Through struggle and loss, the poems in
proceed like timid ghosts learning how to form language, gathering the disparate elements of selfhood into a warm coherency, a radical self-permission.
Rose writes the language of longing with a fierce acuity, but this is also a collection about fulfillment. “In both there is dancing,” Rose’s speaker says of the motion of the tides and of welcoming the divine. These are poems brimming with motion, with hunger, and with aching, full-bodied joy. “This must be how / we can bear to be so empty / so we can be so full.”