Foiled Again - (New Criterion) by Allyn J Rosser (Paperback)

About the Book

The seventh winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize is J. Allyn Rosser's Foiled Again. Ms. Rosser's third poetry collection contains poems of startling range and depth. At the heart of the work is a kind of crazed optimism-a quixotic, wryly cheerful pilgrimage through ...

Book Synopsis

The seventh winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize is J. Allyn Rosser's Foiled Again. Ms. Rosser's third poetry collection contains poems of startling range and depth. At the heart of the work is a kind of crazed optimism-a quixotic, wryly cheerful pilgrimage through the maze of bafflement, loneliness, and love that constitutes our experience. Her poems pursue the transcendent certitudes we crave, and invites us to embrace the present as a revelation we forgot to have. The New Criterion, one of the foremost contemporary venues for poetry, established an annual poetry prize in 2000, and Ivan R. Dee began publication of the annual New Criterion poetry prize-winner in 2001.

Review Quotes

A poet on whom precious little is lost, J. Allyn Rosser loves to subject common experience to an uncommonly intense scrutiny. Getting lost, listening to a Dean Martin song, forgetting a name, encoutering a turtle, reading a children's book-all are studied here in lively fresh language for clues about the possible truth of life. To read Foiled Again is to be edified and delighted.

J. Allyn Rosser is a comic poet whose song is frequently tinged with sadness. She keeps her sense of humor even in the direst circumstances, as she digs into the nature of modern love and old fashioned loneliness, motherhood and solitude. In one of this collection's finest poems, 'Literature, ' the poet admits, 'I could use a good poem to cheer me up.' These poems, in language that is spirited, inventive, and unflinching, never fail to be cheering, because they are so good.

J. Allyn Rosser is a poet of ebullient energy, and she has a comic gift that is all too rare among her contemporaries.

About the Author

J. Allyn Rosser's Misery Prefigured, her second volume of poems, won the Crab Orchard Award and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2001. Her first collection of poems, Bright Moves, won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She teaches at Ohio University and lives in Athens, Ohio.