Patrick Rosal thrills with his speed and tenderness and daring. Blending a New Jersey childhood with his Filipino heritage, he brings irrepressible heart and intelligence to tales of love, violence, and identity. While all three of this riveting performer’s books, including the recently-released Boneshepherds, fiercely reflect the stories and rhythms of the streets, they are, in Terrance Hayes’ words, “laced with a hopefulness born not just of Patrick Rosal's tremendous gifts as a poet, but of his humanity.” And as Junot Diaz observed, the reader emerges from Rosal’s work “shaken, heartbroken, annealed, made new.”

Patrick Rosal’s week-long residency at Smith, featuring workshops, individual student conferences, and a craft lecture Thursday, February 9 (Poetry Center, 7:30 pm) is supported by a gift from Tammis Day ’05.

American-born Bangladeshi Dilruba Ahmed's impressive debut book of poems, Dhaka Dust, won the 2010 Bakeless Literary Prize. It was selected by Arthur Sze, who praised its “rich and luminous weave” of cultural location and perspective. Her poems “spin like compass needles crowded around magnetic fields,” writes Vijay Seshadri, “and they’d probably seem as exotic to a citizen of Dhaka as they would to a citizen of Duluth.” Sensuous language, indelible images, glimpses of transcendence—all these are put to brilliant use in poems of memory, motherhood, the globalized world, and the intimate struggle to feel at home in it.

Richard Jarrette’s first book, Beso the Donkey, prompts wonder, laughter, tears, and has won high praise. Jane Hirshfield confesses being “totally taken and altered by these spare, wise, hauntingly conceived, brilliantly crafted poems.” Beso took W.S. Merwin “completely by surprise… and the poems he summoned are our singular good fortune.” With tenderness and amplitude, the speaker observes the wounded and neglected Beso, and looks into the well of self. Each poem is a gently heart-stopping stopping-place, a stillness, a station of the cross—of grief and of nourishment.

Of Patrick Donnelly’s ambitious first book, The Charge, Gregory Orr wrote: “I hear, throughout these poems, Gospels of passion and compassion.” Donnelly’s long-awaited second volume—Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, which Chase Twichell called “a winged re-imagining of the possibilities of voice”—is even more urgent and satisfying. Interspersed translations from the Japanese, made by the author with his spouse, Stephen D. Miller, provide poignant thematic and tonal echoes to poems that, as Jane Hirshfield puts it, “embrace the omnivorous bonfires of transience and desire.”

Hailed as Ireland’s greatest woman writer, Eavan Boland has published over a dozen volumes of poetry. In work that is feminist, political, and deeply human, Boland applies her extraordinary lyric power to themes of family, history, myth, Irish landscape and poetry. Booklist saluted her as “a feminist Dante, an Irish Adrienne Rich,” and later proclaimed: “If Yeats and Sylvia Plath had a love child, she would be Eavan Boland.” The Times Literary Supplement praised her New Collected Poems as the “finest evidence ever assembled of the escape from the grip of a tradition.” Boland divides her time between Dublin and Palo Alto, where she directs the creative writing program at Stanford University.

Supported by the Program for the Study of Women and Gender

With astonishing ease and clarity, Annie Boutelle's poems manage to be elegant, fierce, gorgeous, and spare—all at once. She is the author of Becoming Bone and Nest of Thistles, winner of the 2005 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize. This Caravaggio, her third and most recent collection, finds its muse in the art and life of the extraordinary and infamous Italian painter. Gerald Stern pronounced the book as “sensual, ambivalent, and shocking as Caravaggio was,” and, in Eleanor Wilner’s words, it “opens us to possession by this seductive art and its defiant maker.” This event celebrates Annie Boutelle’s finely chiseled and electrifying new book and also marks the retirement from Smith, after nearly three decades, of this beloved teacher and colleague and founder of the Poetry Center.