Publisher's Synopsis
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 at first & then 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."
