Difficult Weather

Book excerpt: This new edition of the first full-length collection of poems by award-winning writer Rose Solari provides an important window into the origins and early influences of this now-established poet and novelist. Though most of these poems are set in Washington, DC, and its less affluent suburbs, their lyrical, often elegiac depictions of family and neighborhood life, first love and first losses, will be sure to touch anyone who, like Solari, grew up in a place "more interesting than safe." In selecting Difficult Weather for the Columbia Book Award, Carolyn Forché, now Director of the Lannan Center for Poetry, said of Solari, "Her language is by turns raw and luminous, her perceptions uncommonly acute, and her vision at once incisive and compassionate." Michael Collier, Director of the Bread Loaf Writer's Center, wrote that she is "a poet of passion and precision… Difficult Weather will delight and surprise us all." This edition features a new introduction by poet and translator Katherine E. Young, who places Solari's early work in a national context, and traces some of the poet's most powerful influences, such as the work of Anne Sexton. Its publication, timed to coincide with that of Solari's third poetry collection, The Last Girl, insures that all of Solari's published poetry collections are now in print, for her fans to savor and for new readers to discover.