The Rose Solari Poetry Bundle

The Last Girl

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 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 wholehearted 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, composing a particular and penetrating music which lingers long 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.

Orpheus in the Park

Rose Solari’s second full-length collection of poems is made up of two different yet intertwining strands. In one, Solari explores a variety of myths, climbing beneath the skin of classical heroes and villains to offer contemporary perspectives on these characters and their tales. The other strand consists of poems of celebration and farewell, written for the author’s late parents, as well as in honor of relationships, illusions, and old selves that have passed on. Woven together, the two strands illuminate each other, dissolving boundaries between the past and the present, the extraordinary and the ordinary, the mythical and the everyday.

Difficult Weather

This new edition of the first full-length collection of poems by Rose Solari provides an important window into the origins and early influences of this now-established poet and novelist. Though most of these poems are set in Washington, DC, and its less affluent suburbs, their lyrical, often elegiac depictions of family and neighborhood life, first love and first losses, will be sure to touch anyone who, like Solari, grew up in a place “more interesting than safe.” In selecting Difficult Weather for the Columbia Book Award, Carolyn Forché, now Director of the Lannan Center for Poetry, said of Solari, “Her language is by turns raw and luminous, her perceptions uncommonly acute, and her vision at once incisive and compassionate.” Michael Collier, Director of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Center, wrote that she is “a poet of passion and precision… Difficult Weather will delight and surprise us all.”