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YOU
Coffee House Press, 2024
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“Speaking to herself through the second person ‘you,’ Rosa Alcalá opens a transom through time and space. Reaching all the way back to the ‘eyes that didn’t know what I was witnessing at five,’ the poet gathers vision and selves, memory and prophetic warning. Her attempt to ‘love the world’ helps us to see ourselves as imperfect as we started but indivisible as we might become.”
Farid Matuk
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Available at: Coffee House Press
MyOTHER TONGUE
Futurepoem, 2017
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“[Alcalá] uses empty spaces, hesitations and semantic difficulties to address mothers and daughters, herself as mother and herself as daughter, and the messy emotions and miscommunications that move between languages (in her case, English and Spanish), as well as between and within female bodies, in breastfeeding, menstruation, giving birth. Alcalá’s short, wry lines, self-interruptions and open spaces remind us how little precedent there is for honest writing on these topics, compared with the epic traditions of fathers and sons.”
Stephanie Burt, The New York Times
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Best of 2017: Literary Hub & Entropy
Small Press Distribution Bestseller
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Available at: Futurepoem // Small Press Distribution
The Lust of Unsentimental Waters
Shearsman Books, 2011
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“The Lust of Unsentimental Waters is a playful and rigorous book that attempts to uncover the evolving and sometimes Oz-like machinations of late capitalism… At every juncture, she is wry and brilliant in her attempt to uncover where hierarchies are born.”
Carmen Giménez, Poetry Foundation
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Available at: Shearsman Books // Small Press Distribution
Undocumentaries
Shearsman Books, 2010
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“Rosa Alcalá, originally from Paterson, N.J., is a true daughter of W.C. Williams, with a distinct, gutsy, and penetrating identity twining a public poeisis with her own luminous particulars. I know of no one else writing such poems that cut into and reenact the ‘plebeian’ with such personal force, eloquence, and skill.”
Anne Waldman
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Available at: Shearsman Books // Small Press Distribution
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