Raw Goods Inventory (Iowa Poetry Prize)

In Raw Goods Inventory, Emily Rosko gives us a poetic inventory in a virtuosic display of voices and accents. The poems come with sharp elbows and knees; they are nomadic, acquisitive, dispersive, and diffractive. More elementally, Rosko's poems contain the scattered bric-a-brac of the imagination, with goods that range from a dud egg to genetic hybrids, from Marian iconography to pigs at a state fair. She offers honest embodiments of anxiety, awkwardness, and boredom, as she also recasts with wit and grace the standard poetic fare: love, death, and disappointment. Idiomatic, raw, and skewed in the best possible way, Rosko's poetry manages to speak to us---with arresting lyric gusto---of familiar things.

Emily Rosko was born in Pennsylvania, grew up in the Midwest, and later taught English in Siberia. A recipient of the Stegner, Ruth Lilly, and Javits fellowships, she holds degrees from Cornell and Purdue universities. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Another Chicago Magazine, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and the Denver Quarterly. She is earning a PhD in creative writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia.