Hindsight

“Rosanna Warren’s Hindsight is a work of poly-perspective wonder. The rare prismatic vividness of her language brings to life, in an increasingly turbulent world, the strange beauty of childhood and aging, renewal and expiration, melancholy, grief and outrage. There is an exacting intimacy to her way of examining these tremors, a felt realism that refuses to fall into despair and cynicism; her lyric protest does not take an ironic distance or, worse, relies on virtuosic rhetoric to question intensely “things done from those undone.” Through their compact image and taut music and their rich line-indepthness, these poems craft a different kind of dissent, that of humility, patience, penitence, and, above all, love. Hindsight amounts to an “an enormous fugue,” a secular interlocking of Matins and Compline that compel many returns, poems that remain in the body and help sing against the overlap of personal and civic crises.” – Ishion Hutchinson, author of Fugitive Tilts“Rosanna Warren’s Hindsight is a book of insight, with crickets, bears, and rat snakes in the shadows. Out of our silence, our chafing, and our bile, she has written a book of luminous wisdom and starlight.” – Henri Cole, author of Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994–2022“Rosanna Warren’s poems comfort the reader with a tough and tenacious love. They place curiosity and aesthetic judgment at the heart of the poem, rendering America with the spirited energy of Tintoretto and the soulful grit of the Rolling Stones. These are poems that can walk you home on a dark, mean night. They’ll light the path, they’ll sharpen your sight.” – Katie Peterson, author of Fog and Smoke: Poems

Rosanna Warren is the author of Hindsight and six previous volumes of poetry and is a professor emerita in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She is a recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. She lives in New York City.