Ghost in a Red Hat: Poems

“Achieves a delicate balance between structural solidity and movement. . . . Warren’s latest poems tend to veil their complexity in understatement.”―Harvard Review

In her fifth collection, Rosanna Warren draws inspiration not only from her own life but also from the works of other artists, both classical and contemporary, real and imagined. Warren explores the political and the personal through myth, history, elegy, and erotic lyric. She eulogizes her mother in poems such as “Mediterranean,” where she writes, “the mystery was / not that she walked there, ten years after her death, / / but that she vanished, and let twilight take her place―.” In other poems, Warren contemplates wreckage and sorrow in family life, in Hurricane Katrina, and in the Trojan War, but also moments of eerie blessing. In her most forceful collection to date, she obsessively traces themes, both ancient and modern, in a voice compelling and deeply persuasive.

from "Mediterranean"
     There was something I wanted to say, at the age of twelve,
     some question she hadn't answered,
     and yesterday, so clearly seeing her pace before me
     it rose again to the tip of my tongue, and the mystery was
     not that she walked there, ten years after her death,
     but that she vanished, and let twilight take her place―