Raw Goods Inventory

by Emily Rosko

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 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.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Eleanor · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5 rounded up.

[Kevin Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came to this book because it was recommended as summer reading by Alice Fulton, a poet who I admire and think is not as highly regarded in poetry circles as she ought to be. After reading Rosko’s book, I’m not surprised that Fulton is a fan – they both are very intelligent women who seem to have a good head on their shoulders, by which I mean they seem to be very sensible. And they both have a fondness (or a weakness, at their less satisfying moments) for just about any American vernacular turn of phrase.

While there are similarities between what I take to be a mentor-mentee relationship between Fulton and Rosko (Rosko got an MFA at Cornell), they do seem very different personalities which comes through in the overall tone of their poems: for me, Fulton is more of a touchy-feely poet (meant in the best sense of being highly sensory-focused) while Rosko is much more analytical and cerebral. In fact, I felt the first half of Rosko’s book should’ve been titled “Raw Data Inventory” since more often than not she is jotting down sentence fragments in the way a lab technician might jot down observational data for some experiment. Rosko has a self-assured definitional way of writing that sometimes feels like her confidence is overtaking her observational abilities since the subject is left out of the picture; for example, one poem (admittedly one of her weakest in the volume) begins:

“To say it was over and done with no harm
wasn’t really the case. The hemlocks wind-

burnt, losing. Fishermen wrestle with, hook salmon
in high lead content water. Stunned look, the red

frayed marks. It’s better: eyes averted, both
of us tucked in, knees touching….”

(“What’s Discovered Is Wiped Out”)

Huh? Critical information is being either intentionally left out or simply doesn’t exist and the poem just becomes a series of phrases trying to strike into some meaningful scene/subject/speaker.

In the third section, Rosko writes more about the mining community she apparently grew up in and this gives her a much needed subject that literally grounds the poems. Here her penchant for getting the most out of sassy phrases works best, and her love of geologic perspective is balanced out by it being inhabited by a human community, even her family:

It’s humbling
what happens to flesh. In myth,

	 transfiguration seems more

painful—the permanence of it—
maddened nightingale, gnarled

	 laurel, sleeping bear.

To know release—your own

dissolve. A commissure—your body into

	 mine, the slip

of being here and elsewhere. You are

not you any longer. The dunes

	 shift, restructure their crescents,

each particle undone.

(“Sleeping Bear Dunes”)

I like the pun on “mine” and “commissure” is exactly the right word choice and the type of word you don’t expect to find in a lot of poets’ vocabulary.

Overall this volume wasn’t the rollicking good time I was hoping for when Fulton recommended it (I think it was in the pages of Poetry magazine); but by the end of the book, I came to appreciate Rosko’s level-headedness and sharp observations. She is somewhat in the vein of Marianne Moore, A.R. Ammons, or an Amy Clampitt, and that’s a rich vein to mine!

[Matthew Hittinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm biased as Emily is friend and close-reader of my own work, but I love the final version of this collection. I read an early version of this manuscript in the fall of 2004 and this final version is tight.

I was re-reading this after seeing Emily at AWP earlier this month and have two new favorite poems: "The Toy Divine(s)" and "Less Art, More Monkeys" (in addition to my old time favorites: "Elephant," "At the Sushi Arcade," the title poem, and "Even Before Your Elbow Knocked Over the Glass.")

I love Emily's keen sense of form in every poem, how deliberate the shapes are on each page, the edge to each word and line that often feel as if they could cut you if you're not careful. And I love how Emily experiments with form across all four sections in the book, fully using the page plane (nothing turns me off more than a book of poems where all the poems sit left-justified in boring blocks) and yet through all these visual and spatial variations, the voice, through all its tonal variations, somehow remains unified. A quality I admire.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I heard an interview where Rosko claims that there is no theme to the book, but I would say there's quite a bit of theme. Whether this body-conscious speaker is the poet, the book makes it sure that wherever she is from it "is not without its own tangles."