Order Rosie:
From Unbound Edition Press
In this luminous and unflinching memoir, acclaimed poet Tom Sleigh excavates the complex legacy of his mother Rosie — a brilliant English teacher who escaped dirt-poor Kansas through sheer intellectual force, only to struggle with the contradictions of motherhood and her own fierce independence. Rosie is both elegy and reckoning, a work of devastating beauty.
“Love, honor, pity, pride, compassion, and sacrifice—all the great themes of literature that Faulkner enumerated in his famous Nobel speech are on vivid display in Tom Sleigh’s Rosie. Written in the immediate wake of his mother’s death, it hums with the freshness of the loss, as if its coruscating sentences might will her back to life. And the life the book describes is a quintessentially 20th century American one, that Faulkner himself would have recognized: from hardscrabble poverty to an incendiary marriage to a devastating accusation from one of her own sons later in life. The Rosie that Sleigh summons here is funny, infuriating, irresistible, and often wise, as is the book itself. Read it and weep.”
—Adam Haslett, winner of The Los Angeles Times Book Prize
“Harrowing, tender, contradictory: Tom Sleigh has made a living portrait of his dead mother. Rosie is fiercely alive in these stark pages. Alive in her unhappiness, her outrageousness, her toughness, her affection, in the love of language she bequeathed to her poet son. This book starts with a vision of the mother’s corpse and ends with the death she insisted on, and for which she demanded her son’s help. This memoir is his tribute to her, a grim and loving truthfulness, and a gift to the English language.” —Rosanna Warren
Rosie: A Companion to the Memoir
From Tom Sleigh and filmmaker Ed Robbins comes a video series to accompany the memoir Rosie.
The series features documentary vignettes narrated by Sleigh, as well as readings of his poems written for his mother.
Rosie: Poems from the Memoir
Praise For
“The King’s Touch”
Winner of the 2023
Paterson Poetry Prize
“Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well-founded. I greatly admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.”
—Seamus Heaney
“Sleigh's reviewers use words such as 'adept,' 'elegant,' and 'classical.' Reading his new book, I find all those terms beside the point, even though not one is inaccurate. I am struck by the human dramas that are enacted in these poems, the deep encounters that often shatter the participants and occasionally restore them. What delights me most is seeing a poet of his accomplishments and his large and well-earned reputation suddenly veer into a new arena of both our daily and our mythical lives. For the writer, such daring may be its own reward; for the reader, it is thrilling to overhear a writer pushing into greatness.”