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Patrick Rosal

Visiting Poet

Patrick Rosal

Award-winning author and riveting performer, Patrick Rosal thrills with his speed and tenderness and daring. Political and personal are inextricably twined in poems that can’t help singing, shocking, instructing. Blending a New Jersey childhood with his Filipino heritage, he brings irrepressible heart and intelligence to tales of love, violence, and identity. Junot Diaz pronounced Rosal’s thrilling debut, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, “a book from whose pages you’ll emerge shaken, heartbroken, annealed, made new.”

Publishers Weekly described My American Kundiman, his second collection, as “fast-paced and self-assured,” noting that it reflects “a mélange of precedents—Allen Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, a bevy of hip-hop artists, and Filipino. . . traditions from which he takes his unusual title. A kundiman is either a song of unrequited love or a coded song of political protest, dating from the American occupation. The poems in Rosals’s most recent book, Boneshepherds, similarly embody the fierce stories and rhythms of the streets but, as Terrance Hayes observes, are “laced with a hopefulness born not just of Patrick Rosal’s tremendous gifts as a poet, but of his humanity.”

The son of immigrants, Rosal is a life-long amateur musician, an old-school b-boy and DJ. In the late 80s and early 90s, he produced music for Metropolitan Recording Corporation, working with acts like April Kelly, Laissez Faire, and Joey Gold. While he worked in television, video, and corporate communications, he continued practice as an amateur musician and composer, writing and producing themes and music beds for local-origination magazine and news shows as well as national public service announcements.

Rosal is a recipient of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award, the Global Filipino Literary Award, and the Members’ Choice Award, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines. He has taught widely at the college level, as well as conducting workshops in Alabama prisons through Auburn University, high school workshops through the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and Urban Word NYC. Currently he is a member of the faculty at Rutgers University-Camden’s MFA program as well as Drew University’s Low-Residency MFA program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation.

Select Poems

I deserve nothing but rivers

stirred in ginger

the Ganges swept west

your mother’s tit

I’ll take a beggar’s dime

I’ll take his stagger

I’ll take burlap and cashmere

the slack rope of bound-up

barges & yachts

I’ll take minnows & caviar

palmshacks & mansions

I’ll open your sister’s

mouth Watch me

take away her breath

for Renata Mimi

Who sow buckshot glitter from Cape May to Arthur Kill

Who weave rush-hour Kyrie from lanes of masonry

and steel Who stammer boldfaced gospel on Newark

subway steam What rot feed one man Who record

his rasp Who transcribe his song Who unknot his

gut What spectral redshift beacons ancient

boogie-on-down What heats the heart’s

enthalpic pith Who stop the clock—

submit to speed of light When

have I listened—child—How

will I begin When shall I

open my mouth

and let half

the world

fall in.

Hands to cover the puny heart

Hands to pound that muscle back to its beastly life

Hands to write these lies

Hands to cross them out

Hands to lug the goat by rope to the bloody block

Hands to sting

Hands to coax the first lick of honey from your hips

Hands to cut gristle from gut

Hands to murder time

Hands to tell it

Hands to behemoth

Hands to sting

Hands to tie a perfect knot around the throat

Hands to lead the rest of the body blind

About Patrick

Poetry Center Reading Dates: April 2012