Breezeway

Status: Available

Page Count: 76

Edition: First

ISBN: 978-1-59092-371-9

SRP (USD): $9.99

Size: 5.5x8.5 trade paperback

Cover: Jason Roush

Genre(s): Poetry

Homepage: Jason Roush

What do we take with us from the spaces we travel through? What do we leave behind? In Breezeway, the daylight counterpart to his acclaimed debut After Hours, Jason Roush deftly explores the inner workings of memory and the elusive theme of transience.

"In these spare and lyrical poems, Jason Roush writes, like the great Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, about the ordinary, passing moments of our lives, which are 'suspended / over the swift water of years // that cannot last or happen again.' These poems--at once so wry and conversational, so ardent and precise and unafraid of feeling--remind us in their beauty that we are all living in the 'breezeway of time,' in that long, open passage between all that seems lost and all that still remains."

--Richard McCann, author of Ghost Letters and Mother of Sorrows

"'Should we / take a breath / or not? / Make music // broken or contained?' asks

Jason Roush near the end of Breezeway. Throughout this collection, Roush has consistently shown deliberation, and deliberateness, to be musical: his lines, beautifully broken, are shapely containers of his syntax. For him, the lyric impulse is alive and well, and Breezeway affords the reader an unhurried and expansive pleasure that is nearly extinct in our electronic age. Orchestrating echoes of predecessors from Plath to Cavafy--and Hofmannsthal, in two astonishing translations--this poet writes with a quietude and precision that confer the patina of history upon even the most contemporary subject matter. Whether in the guise of a flâneur who sees a drag queen's 'blue kimono / serenad[ing] summer's end' or contemplating B-movies from the eighties, Roush slows the language down, burnishing each word so that thought and remembrance become vehicles of beauty."

--Christina Pugh, author of Rotary and Gardening at Dusk

By This Author

After Hours

Breezeway

Crosstown