Poetry that reveals the truths present in corporeal (dis)placement

In Chouteau’s Chalk, Rosa Lane’s poems take a deep dive into the emotional and the erotic. Gender bent, her poems reside amid a tomboy’s emerging sexual identity within a world confined by heterosexual construction and its persistent mores. Her collection piques a countermythos that unfolds within a small fishing village opening a forbidden and hidden world with sensorial intensity and lyrical momentum.

An epigraph from Audre Lorde’s notable work The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power hovers over every poem from birth through marriage, traversing calamities and holograms of desire, giving the “I” permission to assume full agency with power and dignity in a manner that is as acute as revelatory.

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In Chouteau's Chalk, Rosa Lane becomes a lionhearted singer of the erotic: as life force, as madness, as mentor, as inventor. Here the body speaks its truth, even as it is fragmented and mocked by commerce, billboard glitter, the cynical commodification of the body. Lane's technical mastery serves the fierce music of these poems, which, like desire itself, did bring me to my knees.

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It's heartening to see a bold collection of poems like Rosa Lane's, remarkable for the inventive language and for a direct and natural representation of the lives of women passionately in love with women.

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Rosa Lane’s Chouteau’s Chalk is poetry to learn poetry from, perfectly catching the web of nature that is outside and inside us at the same time, continually reflecting and notifying our lives. Then she has placed this in the context of living myth and literature, animated by desire, love, and grief. A sumptuous feast.