Poetry

After Robinson Has Gone

Based on the life and work of Weldon Kees, this 25-page chapbook is forthcoming from Greying Ghost Press.

Oneiromance (an epithalamion)

Selected by Patty Seyburn as the winner of the 2007 Gatewood Prize from Switchback books, Oneiromance explores the absurdity and divinity of the marriage ceremony through a dizzying dream sequence with playful verse that skillfully blends call and response with Shakespearean odes, romance and cynicism, storytelling and wordplay.

“Kathleen Rooney’s beautifully structured epithalamion is saturated with nuptial terror: the music and friction, zeal and unease, absurdity and profundity of marriage. Oneiromance (an epithalamion) parodies and feasts upon the vain excesses of contemporary wedding culture, but there’s tenderness and devotion here, too a sweetness that’s saucy rather than cloying: “Her breasts seem to him lovely as mud- / daubed birds’ nests.” I’m thrilled by a sensibility so acerbic, funny, sad, sardonic, insouciant, salty, and bittersweet, by poems so rich with slippage, misgiving, loss, and wit. Rooney’s work is animated by a dexterous, inventive intelligence and a fearless imagination: “those pearls / on your bodice are really your baby teeth?” Her poems fibrillate with fine surprises; their originality and edge are stunning. Like “a book in sandpaper” that could “destroy everything else on the shelves,” Oneiromance (an epithalamion) is scary good, wicked good, and Kathleen Rooney is surely one of the most brilliant poets of her generation, a discovery. Her linguistic powers provoke and awaken the page.” —Alice Fulton