Rosetta

Winner of the Ex Ophidia Poetry Prize, Rosetta was also a finalist for the New American Poetry Prize, the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, the Hillary Gravendyk Prize, and a semi-finalist for the Philip Levine Prize.  Available for purchase through Ex Ophidia Press, SPD books, Bookshop.org, Amazon, or order through your local bookseller.  View the press kit here and the reader’s companion for book groups here.

The poems of Rosetta by Karina Borowicz are composed in a rhetoric stripped to the essential and uttered with the disquieting and insistent familiarity of a recurring dream. It is from that compression that the poems derive their strength, and it is that tonal authority that the reader ultimately trusts to navigate the poems’ dark and glittering waters. The poetry here is unlike any other. Borowicz is a master of startling insight and control. Rosetta is a remarkable book.

—David Sanders, author of Compass and Clock

Karina Borowcz’s Rosetta is an aptly named collection of poems since it speaks in three languages at once: metaphor, music, and magic. It begins with a searing poem in three points of view—refugee parents, a child, and that child as an adult—all severed from ‘The Old Country’ by ‘the saw blade of history.’ … Borowicz’s collection is a brilliant ‘burning book’ of poems so vivid and moving that the reader is drawn from one page to the next by the urgency of a poet who knows that ‘if something is going / to happen /it happens.’

—Sharon Cumberland, author of Strange with Age

Never content to paint mere surfaces, Borowicz finds in common things the emblems of an existence hidden to all but the most sensitive observer. In Rosetta, her gaze takes in overlooked figures and landscapes close at hand – an elderly neighbor, a decaying garden, a crumbling house – then extends to the cosmos, seeking human resonances in the most forbidding places.

—Joshua Coben, author of Night Chaser