In this luminous and unflinching memoir, acclaimed poet Tom Sleigh excavates the complex legacy of his mother Rosie — a brilliant English teacher who escaped dirt-poor Kansas through sheer intellectual force, only to struggle with the contradictions of motherhood and her own fierce independence.

From her white dog fur shroud to her final performance as she chose her own death at ninety-seven, Rosie emerges as both tender and terrifying, devoted and distant. Sleigh weaves together her own journal entries, family photographs, and his award-winning poetry to create a portrait that is simultaneously heartbreaking and darkly comic.

This is a book about words as weapons and balm, about the inheritance of trauma and brilliance, and about a son's attempt to understand a mother who loved literature more than motherhood. With the precision of a surgeon and the heart of a poet, Sleigh has crafted a masterpiece of memoir that reads like a novel — urgent, honest, and utterly unforgettable.

Rosie is both elegy and reckoning, a work of devastating beauty.

Tom Sleigh's many books include the 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize winner, The King's Touch, House of Fact, House of Ruin, Station Zed, and Army Cats, all from Graywolf Press. His most recent book of essays is The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing In an Age of Refugees. His awards include a Guggenheim, two NEA grants, Kingsley Tufts Award, Shelley Memorial Award, and both the Updike Award and Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Threepenny, Poetry, and other magazines. A Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, he lives in Brooklyn, NY.

"Harrowing, tender, contradictory: Tom Sleigh has made a living portrait of his dead mother. Rosie is fiercely alive in these stark pages. Alive in her unhappiness, her outrageousness, her toughness, her affection, in the love of language she bequeathed to her poet son. This book starts with a vision of the mother's corpse and ends with the death she insisted on, and for which she demanded her son's help. This memoir is his tribute to her, a grim and loving truthfulness, and a gift to the English language." — Rosanna Warren

"Love, honor, pity, pride, compassion, and sacrifice -- all the great themes of literature that Faulkner enumerated in his famous Nobel speech are on vivid display in Tom Sleigh's Rosie... The Rosie that Sleigh summons here is funny, infuriating, irresistible, and often wise as is the book itself. Read it and weep." — Adam Haslett