Featured Audio: “Letter from Sligo Creek” a poem by Rose Solari

Hear Rose Solari Read “Letter from Sligo Creek” from her Award-Winning Collection, Difficult Weather

“Like the cover photo, the poems in Difficult Weather are timeless and—unlike the poems in many first books—extraordinarily mature. Although the narrative voice is generally that of a young woman in her late twenties and early thirties whose subject matter sometimes ranges back to early childhood, these are poems of adulthood: the discovery and endlessly painful rediscovery of human frailty, sexual and emotional betrayal, bad love in all its familial and romantic varieties, memory, and elegy.” Katherine E Young, from the introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of Difficult Weather

 

Carolyn Forché chose Rose Solari’s first book of poems, the aptly titled Difficult Weather, for the Columbia Book Award in 1995. 23 years later the poems retain their stopping power, and affect even more so now that a large part of the collective political conscious has formed a hospitable environment for their flourishing. Recently Rose shared her moving poem “A Story,” which details the trauma of her assault, in support of #WhyIDidntReport. But there is a political catch, for these poems of memory and elegy, poems of female empowerment, and honest stories of romantic and sexual betrayal, are not only let to flourish in their fullest extent because of recent political movements toward empathy, but are inherently politicized as oppositional or radical texts by certain parties because of the recent focus on the vocalization of trauma which was once tacitly relegated to the pages of poetry collections. Difficult Weather is as out in the open now as it has ever been, is as on the lips of Rose Solari and in the ears of her audience as it has ever been, it is only now that it has become a particularly potent entity of mainstream political conversation, a force for truth, more indelible than a tweet, more visceral than a news story— from poetry pages and the bravery of survivors: this is the fount of revolution. As sure as death and taxes, no matter the politics, there will always be Difficult Weather and for this reason Rose Solari’s rawest work will be just as powerful and important in its fortieth anniversary sleeve as it is in its twentieth.

Enjoy Rose read “Letter from Sligo Creek” a keystone poem in this captivating collection.

 

Hear Rose read “Letter from Sligo Creek”

Letter from Sligo Creek


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