Say Anything poems prose poems

Say Anything finds Lee Rossi in an unexpectedly expansive mood. Over the course of his previous work, we’ve learned to expect the deep, the dark and the dire. There was of course the occasional laugh, but laughter is often close to the surface here, whether he is bemoaning a mythical parent or upbraiding his own penchant for gloom. Whatever the subject or the occasion, Rossi keeps things bright and luminous. Now in his eighth decade, he chooses to ignore the darkness on the horizon and celebrate the oddities and beauties of this marvelous life.

Lee Rossi's collection Say Anything reveals he is a poet constantly questioning his cralt and the larger world in which it exists. From the quotidian to the sublime, these poems explore the vagaries of life which is "something in the fox's mouth, something still alive but just barely.”

-Lynne Thompson

Lee Rossi's previous books (Ghost Diary, Wheelchair Samurai, and Darwin's Garden among them) have been, in part, progressive chroniclings of his life, his dialectic with God, and our common joys & flawed humanity. This new book, Say Anything, takes it further, varying dictions—sometimes Bukowski-esque without the crassness, sometimes riffing on Christopher Smart, sometimes like Creeley in thin, taut lines, still other times in prose poems. Rossi continues his exploration of the self and its foibles inside a new progression—this time, a reckoning with mortality. "Every day the ceiling gets lower," reports the voice in "The Angel Angle." Say Anything is a free-drawn topographical map of a book, a mirror to a man.

-Gerald Fleming

From Publisher’s Weekly: “Readers seeking a spiritual, sophisticated collection will find depth, lightness, and surprising illumination in Rossi’s poetry, ‘whose only motive is joy.’” Read the rest of the review here: BookLife

Mark Daley, poet: I love the way you drill into the pain in particular details . . . I feel like the masochistic dental patient in “Little Shop of Horrors.”

Darwin’s Garden

In Darwin’s Garden poet and critic Lee Rossi returns to the original garden, childhood, in search of clues to his long, strange life. Part paleontologist, part historian, he seeks to uncover the physical and cultural artifacts left behind in the long climb to adulthood. Is it religion, is it science, is it myth which best describes the arc of a life? He tries them all, and finds only himself wanting.

Much as Darwin walked his ‘thinking path’ in his garden at Downe House in Kent, Lee Rossi teases out the hidden structures of experience in this remarkable work on childhood, bearing the freight of ancestors, masculine codes, sex, religion, and the not-so-tender mercies of nuns, and parents. Not a journey, really, but a meander through complex configurations of relationship and dissolution, a rueful contemplation, a gutsy truth-telling. These poems are sharply observed and nuanced, both stinging and wise. Do not miss anything under the section entitled ‘A Lucky Stiff.’

-Marsha de la O, author of Antidote for Night

Lee Rossi’s new collection, Darwin’s Garden: Studies from Life, is a powerfully engaging exploration of becoming and being a white man, born in the shadow of WWII, raised middle class in America’s suburbs, with your heritage boiled down to blandness. The question of what made a man was answered in this particular past by the worship of soldiers, by the bruises [that] bloomed like roses on the body of one speaker’s rough father, and by the injuries the speaker of another poem incurs as a boy when he dares to show mercy to the loser of a childhood game. . . . Readers curious to map the effects of toxic masculinity, not least on the masculine themselves, need look no further than these pages.

-Francesca Bell, author of Bright Stain

Wheelchair Samurai

Wheelchair Samurai sketches a life in shades of contradiction, futility and want. Interrogating the self as ruthlessly as the Grand Inquisitor, these poems enact rituals of disillusionment. The self, final refuge of beatniks and idealists, is discovered to be the quagmire the boddhisattvas warned us about. Rossi advises us to abandon hope—then welcome it when, yet again, life disappoints every expectation, even the most dire.

Lee Rossi is a poet of wit and elegance. The poems in Wheelchair Samurai engage, delight, and surprise the reader. The range of subjects is vast: motel sex, poverty, Descartes and the legendary fly, hilarious alternative endings to The Story of O, a lunar eclipse, death and Francis Bacon. What seems casual at first emerges as a profound meditation on life and nature.

-Gloria Vando, author of Shadow and Suppose

Lee Rossi is a masterful tour guide through landscapes of the sacred and profane, a universe of moments both heartbreaking and funny, where fighting roosters are “pit bulls with feathers” and the summer air is “a minnestrone of milkweed and pollen.”

-Ruth L. Schwartz, author of Dear Good Naked Morning

As Rossi says in one of his poems, “surfaces betray.” And so he delves, finding the truth that lies beneath. The poetry in this compelling collection exposes the dark and the light of human relationships—between husbands and wives, soldiers and lovers, fathers and sons, gods and goddesses.

-Frances Lefkowitz, author of To Have Not: a Memoir

Ghost Diary

Beautifully inventive and filled with bravery of statement, Ghost Diary reveals a multifaceted poet, his shattered innards and pieced-together hopes. Deceptive and truthful at the same time, he loves and leers, curses God with his gratitude for God, a real Israelite—meaning one who struggles with God. With imagery so fresh, the reader is often unprepared for the connections he makes—which is good—so much poetry these days gives us the meal we ordered and WE DON’T WANT THE MEAL WE ORDERED. IF WE DID, WE WOULDN’T HAVE ORDERED IT!!

Rollicking, bemused and rueful—at times shocking, even hopeful, this is American poetry you can feel patriotic about.

-Tony Hoagland

Lee Rossi’s particular gift is calling the spirit of a time and place so that it shimmers and breathes in the present. Rossi’s poetry constructs a personal history inside a vibrant, sensual world, the one we all live in daily but whose contours and textures we often forget to name so specifically.

-Eloise Klein Healy