Winner of the 2021 Burnside Review Press Book Award, selected by Sommer Browning. "They say timing is everything. I can't remember what they say that about. Romance? Language? In Nathaniel Rosenthalis' I WON'T BEGIN AGAIN, timing is everything is true for just about everything. From mis-overhearing small profundities on the street to 'the motion of coming down a stair' Rosenthalis shows that our inescapable timelines are beautiful and lonely and funny. In 'A Ten-Minute Moment' he slows time and guides us through that sparkling carelessness with which we first turn over an hourglass to the antsy loss we feel watching the last grain of sand fall to the bottom. He writes with an easy, abstract humor: 'I am often,' he says in a poem called 'On Where I'm Not Supposed to Exist.' He writes with a boundarylessness between the 'I' and all that is outside it: 'A newspaper blows across the hardwood floor, making me want to be held. I write down "Behold."' These poems highlight the way the world works its constant absurdity and they help us feel okay when we realize we work that same way. A dangerous desire, love, and intimacy ripple through the poems: 'how / hot it was when // he slammed what / a door had been, for him. / Into me.' I get that. Damn do I get that--to feel most alive when loved and loving. It stops the clock for a moment."--Sommer Browning "'My devotion, after all / is that I even got up,' says Nathaniel Rosenthalis, belying the title of his mesmerizing debut, I Won't Begin Again. For, in poem after poem, Rosenthalis argues for--and enacts--resilience in a world where doubt can seem 'the architecture of the moment.' 'Not fantasizing, not hoping, was error also,' and indeed these poems resist the world's (and the self's) instability by noticing the least detail ('it was like / resistance // to notice, so / I did. And do') but through a teetering of vision: a green wall is 'millionly leafy,' the sun 'crumples one random can,' which is to say that the poems are acts of reinvention, of reimagining life's possibilities. Philosophical, surreal in the tradition of Rimbaud's Illuminations, and slyly erotic, I Won't Begin Again is finally a triumph of emotion, what Rosenthalis defines as 'putting yourself over another / to make a different sense.' I feel changed by these poems--powerfully so, gratefully." --Carl Phillips Poetry.

I Won’t Begin Again

Literature & Fiction

Rosenthalis, Nathaniel

Poetry

Burnside Review Press

Nathaniel Rosenthalis' The Leniad is a mesmerizing, romantic, and surreal collection of poems. Rosenthalis writes with the care of the maker of the universe, turning everything over from the world's tallest mountains to the smallest pebble on the beach, always landing on the exact word. Rosenthalis is a poet who "hears the highway is blue in a blur" and listens.

The Leniad

Broken Sleep Books

Works and Days

24 Hour Air is a cycle of twenty-four prose poems that takes place on the scale of a mythic day. Documenting each hour in this day, the cycle depicts different zones of the writer's life. A painting studio, the sands of Fire Island, a childhood bedroom, a game of Tetris; the death of a father, the loss of lovers, life synchronized with and without friends. Rosenthalis' systematic approach, where each poem takes its title and imagery from another poem in the cycle, releases a psychosomatic painterliness that apprehends what one poem calls, in a tongue-in-cheek gesture towards Shakespearean philosophizing, "quintessence." The attention to detail in these internal still lifes becomes ultimately life-affirming: "As long as a length happens, like a sheer black stocking, anyone can try on in-ness, I think." This is a world of spit, semen, and tears. These poems veer at times absurd and enigmatic, mysterious and quizzical, through an awe-inspiring faith in the power of the imagination. Departing from the famed contemporary American painter Jennifer Bartlett's series of twenty-four paintings, on permanent display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 24 Hour Air moves beyond conventional ekphrasis to become its own sensual and idiosyncratic autobiographical work of art.

24 Hour Air

Arts & Photography

[Pank]

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rosenthalis, Nathaniel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Rosenthalis, Nathaniel