Beyond Rescue

Literature & Fiction

Rossi, Lee

Poetry

Bombshelter Press

Beautifully inventive and filled with bravery of statement, Ghost Diary use many different forms to reveal a multifaceted poet, his shattered innards and pieced-together hopes. He is deceptive and truthful all at the same time, he loves and leers, curses God with his gratitude for God. With imagery so fresh, the reader is often unprepared for the connections he makes.

Ghost Diary

Terrapin Press

In Darwin’s Garden poet and critic Lee Rossi returns to the original garden, childhood, in search of clues to his long, strange life. Part paleontologist, part historian, he seeks to uncover the physical and cultural artifacts left behind in the long climb to adulthood. Is it religion, is it science, is it myth which best describes the arc of a life? He tries them all, and finds only himself wanting.Lee Rossi’s brilliant poetry takes us on a journey from his puzzled Midwest childhood to an ever-searching maturity, his lyric heart skillfully exploring the strange contradictions he encounters. His poems in this wonderful collection are dazzling, serious, wry, self-effacing, illuminating.— Peter Neil Carroll, author of The Truth Lies on Earth.Lee Rossi’s new collection, Darwin’s Garden: Studies from Life, is a powerfully engaging exploration of becoming and being a white man, born in the shadow of WWII, raised middle class in America’s suburbs, with your heritage boiled down to blandness. The question of what made a man was answered in this particular past by the worship of soldiers, by the bruises [that] bloomed like roses on the body of one speaker’s rough father, and by the injuries the speaker of another poem incurs as a boy when he dares to show mercy to the loser of a childhood game. Rossi grapples with big subjects in this fine book—with boyhood and fatherhood, with love and sex, with religion and sin and complicity. That he does so successfully speaks to his always-deft deployment of vivid, devastating detail and gorgeous imagery. Readers curious to map the effects of toxic masculinity, not least on the masculine themselves, need look no further than these pages. — Francesca Bell, author of Bright StainMuch as Darwin walked his ‘thinking path’ in his garden at Down House in Kent, Lee Rossi teases out the hidden structures of experience in this remarkable work on childhood, bearing the freight of ancestors, masculine codes, sex, religion, and the not-so-tender mercies of nuns, and parents. Not a journey, really, but a meander through complex configurations of relationship and dissolution, a rueful contemplation, a gutsy truth-telling. These poems are sharply observed and nuanced, both stinging and wise. Do not miss anything under the section entitled ‘A Lucky Stiff.’ — Marsha de la O, author of Antidote for Night

Darwin's Garden

Moontide Press

Say Anything

Plain View Press, LLC

Lee Rossi's third book of poems sketches a life in shades of contradiction, futility and want. Interrogating the self as ruthlessly as the Grand Inquisitor, these poems enact rituals of disillusionment. The self, final refuge of beatniks and idealists, is discovered to be the quagmire the bodhisattvas warned us about. Rossi advises us to abandon hope - then welcome it when, yet again, life disappoints every expectation, even the most dire. "Lee Rossi is a poet of wit and elegance. The poems in his third collection, Wheelchair Samurai, will engage, inform, delight, and surprise the reader. The range of multilayered subjects is vast: motel sex, poverty, Descartes and the legendary fly, hilarious alternative endings to The Story of O, tattoos "covering the drive-in movie screen of his [brother-in-law's] back," a lunar eclipse, death, and Francis Bacon. What seems casual at first glance, emerges as a profound meditation on life (human, animal, insect) and nature. We are all inextricably connected in Rossi's metaphorical world. [Still, there is often an underlying sense of sadness and betrayal.] One poem in particular, "Letter to a Grandchild," is sound advice for living, writing, loving. This is a poet at the top of his form and the wise reader will sit back and listen." Gloria Vando, author of Shadows and Supposes "Lee Rossi is a masterful tour guide through landscapes of the sacred and profane, a universe of moments both heartbreaking and funny, where fighting roosters are 'pit bulls with feathers,' and the summer air is 'a minestrone of milkweed and pollen.' These poems are scintillant with wit, shot through with sudden revelations and the startling, brief gleam of compassion and truth.  Like the crowd gathered around a suicide in 'Almost Icarus,' Rossi keeps us, his readers, 'straining for a glimpse of that body / its imperfect beauty as fragile as our own.'"  Ruth L. Schwartz, author of Dear Good Naked Morning and Edgewater "As Rossi says in one of these poems, 'surfaces betray.' And so he delves, finding the truth that lies beneath. The poetry in this compelling collection exposes the dark and the light of human relationships - between husbands and wives, soldiers and lovers, fathers and sons, gods and goddesses." Frances Lefkowitz, editor, reviewer, and author of To Have Not: A Memoir.

Wheelchair Samurai

Plain View Press

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

Books by Rossi, Lee