Michelle Brittan Rosado

Michelle Brittan Rosado earned her MFA from California State University, Fresno, and is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing & Literature at University of Southern California as a Wallis Annenberg Endowed Fellow. She has received awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Vermont Studio Center, and USC's Center for Transpacific Studies. Her work is published or forthcoming in literary journals including Calyx, Crab Creek Review, Los Angeles Review, Nimrod, Poet Lore, and Quarterly West, as well as the anthology Time You Let Me In. A native of San Francisco, she now lives in Long Beach.

THEORY ON FALLING INTO A REEF
BY MICHELLE BRITTAN ROSADO
$10.00

Winner of the inaugural
Rick Campbell Prize Anhinga Press, 2016
I don’t ever want to leave these poems. I want to live with their intimacy and proximity of memory and body. The brilliant craft and gorgeous precision of these poems is affirming and calls the reader back again and again, like great poems do. Michelle Brittan Rosado writes about longing and belonging, what is broken and whole. Here is a poet and person coming into her own graceful voice, through a “scattering of broken blooms,” perched at the “edge of something that could alter the whole sky.” I recommend Theory on Falling into a Reef with utmost enthusiasm and love.
―Lee Herrick, author of Gardening Secrets of the Dead

In her poems Michelle Brittan Rosado engages us in the process of unearthing and integrating the variegated, sometimes conflicting, and ultimately unknowable threads of her complex personal and cultural history. Rosado's speaker ferries us between a colonized, multiethnic Borneo and California’s suburbia as she attempts to make meaning of who she is and what’s shaped her: distant relatives and a language she doesn’t understand; otherness and isolation; the wildly different yet comforting landscapes of the Central Valley and the Malaysian rain forest; the tender frontier of committed love. In the end, she makes a “home” in art—that liminal space where her disparate worlds meet and where she continues her work of transformation: “At any moment // I can never tell if I’m disappearing // into myself, or at the edge / of something that could alter // the whole sky.” My lived experience is deepened by these compassionate and insightful poems. ―Mari L'Esperance, author of The Darkened Temple