Prayers From The Protosonic

A powerful, ebullient new collection of poetry from the acclaimed author of Brooklyn Antediluvian, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets

Prayers From the Protosonic traces the sacred through our natural landscapes and changing seasons, rendering the poet’s life of dance, failure, distance, and so many instances of touch, probing the ways he might confront death and celebrate love through aging. With jubilant music, Rosal’s poems distill agony and tenderness into tremor and sumptuous reverberation. This is a book that troubles celestial questions with sensual attention, traveling across languages and deep into history in search of immanence and intimacy, the invention of sacrament and the sacrament of invention, this effusive renewal by way of utter presence, where quiet begets a wish, and a wish begets a profound listening—until this listening becomes holy.