J. Allyn Rosser's Chronic Transience offers poems that uncover profound truths we didn't know we had missed. Rosser's formal skill is incomparable — a poet who can get more liveliness into a single word than many poets achieve in an entire poem. Her virtuosity always serves emotional truth, whether the hilarity of 'Notes on the Latin' or the poignancy of 'Assisted Living.'
These poems pulse with the urgency of a life fully examined — from tender portraits of aging fathers to devastating wit. Rosser navigates between humor and heartbreak with extraordinary dexterity, finding in ordinary moments — a restaurant dinner, a death's door phone call, evening primrose blooming — a nerve center of human experience. Her eye for detail matches her ear for speech's music, creating verses that sing even as they sting.
Chronic Transience faces mortality, yet these poems are indestructible. Rosser proves that existence's temporary nature makes it precious, transforming shared fragility into enduring art.
"This is simply a brilliant book. A necessary book. The artistry is impeccable, but it's the soul of the thing that makes it so unique. J. Allyn Rosser has every poetic skill: an excellent ear, a sense of form that is both singular and ancient, and a mind alert to both the hilarities and the futilities of life. I find her work delightful, disturbing, and a deep consolation." — Christian Wiman, author of Survival Is A Style
"A phrase from J. Allyn Rosser's poem 'Airportal' will stay with me forever: 'the weighty and sobering trappings of love.' Simply as a line, it's astonishing; but it's also a terse guide to her whole effort, be it laugh-out-loud funny (see 'Self of Steam') or profoundly moving (see 'Pre-Latter-Day Love Poem,' the most beautiful love poem I've read in ages), or as a rule both. The sheer heft and seriousness of Rosser's accomplishment, in the very best sense of those nouns, is as impressive as her extraordinary prosodic dexterity. To call Chronic Transience her best book is to say a mouthful, but so it is." — Sydney Lea, former Vermont Poet Laureate, author of What Shines
"J. Allyn Rosser's Chronic Transience is a timeless book for how we live now. In poem after poem, she offers 'the imagined defying the real' in fleeting glances, nimble mini-epiphanies that haunt, slippery like dreams upon waking. She finds impermanence everywhere, the eerie 'self of steam' typo in a student paper which turns to mist in this poet's hands. Whether she's writing a villanelle, a sonnet, an abecedarian, rhyming couplets, anaphora, or spinning in a teacup (the ride) in a deft unpunctuated lineated sentence, J. Allyn Rosser is a alive with ineffable wonder even as she reckons with mortality, that 'fragile freaking peekaboo of being.' Only this poet could channel Emily Dickinson — 'I heard my phone buzz when I died' — and make us laugh and cry in the same poem." — Denise Duhamel, author of In Which
"J. Allyn Rosser is a poet of great range and intelligence. Over and over in Chronic Transience, I am seduced by a poetic voice that seems almost casual, the voice of a friend who slowly reveals — perhaps she has just discovered it! — a grand insight that I had not at all been expecting. How did we get here, I ask myself at the end of each poem . . . and I go back to the beginning, trying to figure it out, only to be surprised again by Rosser's mastery of persona, of tone, of mind. Brilliant and sharp, poignant and witty, Chronic Transience is the work of one of this country's smartest poets at the top of her game." — Kevin Prufer, author of Sleepaway: A Novel
"J. Allyn Rosser understands performance. Think John Donne, whose conceits, formal constructions, and word play centered audience, an Elizabethan societal contract. Think Dorothy Parker, whose wit, syntax, and dispassion hit their mark almost too well, earning her both fame and a spot on Hollywood's blacklist. Chronic Transience starts at the intersection of these great minds, where community — with one's cultural moment, one's lovers, family, friends, the planet and all its mortal bodies — is paramount, eminently worthy of both skewering and lamenting. I've waited too long to read a new ingenious Rosser collection; this one is a master class in rhyme- and line-making, hilarious and heartbreaking." — Kathy Fagan, author of Bad Hobby
"John Keats would have adored this book, feeling as he did at times 'half in love with easeful Death,' his name 'writ in water.' Chronic Transience is the most complete recent account I have read of 'this useless slippery impenetrable / prize of life,' its humor and melancholy, its loves and its limits. J. Allyn Rosser looks unflinchingly at impermanence and the shifting sands of meaning that circumscribe our long lives, and for which art is only a poor and partial retort. Yet here it is, the real thing, from one of our finest poets, and it is a lot; it is everything. You must read this book!" — David Yezzi, author of More Things in Heaven: New and Selected Poems
