The Last Girl

The Last Girl, poems by Rose Solari

A shimmering girl who disappears in daylight. A boy who goes to war and comes back forever broken. New landscapes in which old ghosts appear, telling their stories. Such are the people, places, and images that fill Rose Solari’s third collection of poetry, The Last Girl. Moving beyond the often-narrative constructions of her previous collection, the poems in this collection tell their truths slant-wise, in spiky, inventive lines that sing their way under the reader’s skin.

Readers familiar with Solari’s previous, prize-winning work will recognize the whole-hearted lyricism of her elegiac moments, while delighting in a new linguistic inventiveness. Those coming to the poet’s work for the first time will be impressed with her range of tones, with how gracefully she sweeps the reader from dark to light, from pain to joy, weaving a particular and penetrating word-magic that lingers after the book is closed. The poems in this collection represent a writer working at the peak of her powers, possessed of technical mastery, fierce perception, and a tender but unsentimental heart.

The Last Girl by Rose Solari casts the spell of a held piano note on a dark key. A haunting melancholy runs through these rich, finely crafted poems. Solari writes with honesty, empathy, and tenderness about the islands we find ourselves on—our shipwrecked lives and our survival. — Jim Daniels, poet and co-editor of American Poetry: The Next Generation