Rooms Overhead
Betsy Sholl
"Betsy Sholl's simple language reveals a vision of innocence and purity that can only be reached by breaking taboos against our grotesque, wild, sexual
animal selves. Her poems do it quietly, even discreetly, but there is a moment of primitive purity in each of her best poems that I find exciting to encounter."
—Diane Wakoski
"Betsy Sholl delivers her dense complex visionary world with grace and musical skill. Her materials are most familiar, but they are not ordinary. She well
knows the world we live in, and she knows much more than that. She is a fresh and striking talent, a highly serious one."
—Fred Chappell
"Betsy Sholl's Rooms Overhead moves with a breathless intensity. The poems snap open and shut with the fluidity of rapid eye movements in the real world.
What passes with fugitive quickness is captured and ordained in the language: 'I want the real, the sound of it cracking,/ shiny yolk spilling like the birth of
the sun./ And when that's done, I want to be free of wanting.' These poems track down origins and losses with a sharp tongue and celebratory vision. Here
is a woman at a critical juncture in her life, who takes a long look back and a deep breath toward whatever it will take to bear witness and record what's
ahead. The book is studded with talent and awareness."
—Jack Myers
about the author
Betsy Sholl is Poet Laureate of Maine. Her many books of poetry include The Red Line, which won the 1991 Associated Writing Programs' award series in poetry, and Don't Explain, which won the University of Wisconsin's Felix Pollak Prize. Her newest book, Late Psalm, is out from the University of
Wisconsin Press. Other awards include an NEA Fellowship and a Maine State Writers' Grant. Sholl teaches at the University of Southern Maine, and in the Vermont College M.F.A. Program, and has been poet-in-residence at Bucknell University.
also by betsy sholl: changing faces and appalachian winter
