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Cover Image: West End of Provincetown Harbor
(Photo by Jason Roush, 2004)
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“In these spare and lyrical poems, Jason Roush writes, like the great Greek poet Constantine
Cavafy, about the ordinary, passing moments of our lives, which are ‘suspended / over the swift water of years // that
cannot last or happen again.’ These poems—at once so wry and conversational, so ardent and precise and unafraid
of feeling—remind us in their beauty that we are all living in the ‘breezeway of time,’ in that long, open
passage between all that seems lost and all that still remains.”
—Richard McCann, author of Mother
of Sorrows
“‘Should we / take a breath
/ or not? / Make music // broken or contained?’ asks Jason Roush near the end of Breezeway. Throughout this
collection, Roush has consistently shown deliberation, and deliberateness, to be musical: his lines, beautifully broken,
are shapely containers of his syntax. For him, the lyric impulse is alive and well, and Breezeway affords the reader
an unhurried and expansive pleasure that is nearly extinct in our electronic age. Orchestrating echoes of predecessors from
Plath to Cavafy—and Hofmannsthal, in two astonishing translations—this poet writes with a quietude and precision
that confer the patina of history upon even the most contemporary subject matter. Whether in the guise of a flâneur
who sees a drag queen’s ‘blue kimono / serenad[ing] summer’s end’ or contemplating B-movies from the
eighties, Roush slows the language down, burnishing each word so that thought and remembrance become vehicles of beauty.”
—Christina Pugh, author of Restoration
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