Sixteen Rivers Press: Rosa Lane + Nina Lindsay

Rosa Lane is a native of coastal Maine, with familial and ancestral roots in lobster fishing. She earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is the author of the poetry chapbook Roots and Reckonings (Granite Press, East, 1980). Her work has won several awards and appeared in numerous journals, including The Briar Cliff Review, Crab Orchard Review, New South, and Ploughshares. After earning her second master’s and a PhD in sustainable architecture from UC Berkeley, Lane works as an architect and divides her time between coastal Maine and the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her partner.

“Rosa Lane’s poetry reminds us why, at a certain time in our lives, we’ve had enough of innocence. Here is a compendium of those so crucial, chronology-defying self-revelations that we only know through our skin. Every line carries with it a resonant sense of what matters, and why. Her voice is soft and sure, mature and intimate, the boldness of insight always subsumed by an extraordinary empathy for her demons. Each poem is a skiff sculling through sounds almost Hopkinsesque, each measure of music anchored by the ground base we feel more than hear.” —Jeffrey Levine

Nina Lindsay’s first collection of poetry, Today’s Special Dish, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2007. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and has been awarded the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. Lindsay also writes children’s literary criticism and reviews for Kirkus, The Horn Book Magazine, School Library Journal, and other publications. She lives in Oakland, California, where she works for the Oakland Public Library.

“Nina Lindsay’s Because is beautiful work. The poems pick through the things of the world, her world, exposing the unseen and intensifying the seen. They question what she calls ‘our multifrond uncertainties and errors’ and ‘hesitant happiness.’ She negotiates with great poise the push-pull of darkness and light, presence and absence, waking consciousness and the dream life. The familiar becomes, in her telling, unfamiliar and fraught. ‘February’s dust is rapturous,’ she says. The poems, too, even in their melancholies, are rapturous.” —W. S. Di Piero