Patrick Rosal

Patrick Rosal is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Brooklyn Antediluvian, which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. Composing fabulist elements, archival materials, family history, soul music, folkloric practices and DJ culture, Rosal’s poetry holds very specific brutalities to light—imperialism, natural calamity, state violence, personal heartbreak. Rather than simply unreeling a litany of suffering, the poems map a way for the imagination to survive, honor, and love. Brooklyn Antediluvian culminates in a long poem that traverses through many histories and continents, contemplating the nature of names. Floods of flora, fauna, and the waters of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and Typhoon Ondoy recur as leitmotif allowing the poem to meditate upon the floods of gentrification, language, and feeling. Publishers Weekly has called the book “an earth-shattering performance.”

Rosal’s other three books are Boneshepherds, My American Kundiman, a winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award, and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, winner of the Asian American Writers Workshop Members’ Choice Award. His writing has appeared in Tin House, New England Review, Poetry, Best American Poetry, Grantland, and many other journals and anthologies. He has been a featured performer internationally in Greece, South Africa, the UK and at various spaces in the Caribbean, South America, and the Philippines. He has also delivered readings and performances at hundreds of venues and festivals throughout the United States, among them the Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum, and the Dodge Poetry Festival. A former Fulbright Research Scholar, he has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Texas, Austin, Bloomfield College, as well as Kundiman’s summer writing retreat for Asian American poets, carceral facilities in Chicago and Alabama, and youth programs throughout the country. He is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Camden.

Photograph credit: Margarita Corporan