?Rock | Salt | Stone sprays life-preserving salt through the hard realities of rocks, stones, and rockstones used as anchors, game pieces, or weapons. The manuscript travels through Africa, the Caribbean, and the USA, including cultures and varieties of English from all of those places. The poems center the experience of the outsider, whether she is an immigrant, a woman, or queer. Sometimes direct, sometimes abstract, these poems engage different structures, forms, and experiences while addressing the sharp realities of family, sexuality, and immigration.
BIO
Rosamond S. King is a creative and critical writer, performer, and artist whose work is deeply informed by the many cultures and communities she is part of, by history, and by a sense of play. Her poetry has been published in more than two dozen journals and anthologies, and she has performed in theatres, museums, nightclubs, and traditional literary venues in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and throughout North America. She has also received numerous honors, including a Fulbright Award and fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson, Mellon and Ford Foundations, Poets House and the Franklin Furnace Fund. She is the author of the chapbook, At My Belly and My Back and the critical book, Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination, which won the 2015 Caribbean Studies Association Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize for the best book in Caribbean studies.
King holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with a minor in Performance Studies from New York University, and is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York. The goal of her work is to make people feel, wonder, and think, in that order.
REVIEWS
"Nation language, language poetry, prose poems, spells, Caribbean nancy stories, queer issues, Rock|Salt|Stone, African (Yoruba) belief systems and ancestral memory all find a place in Rosamond S. King’s multiplicity of forms. The embodied quality of the poems and King’s willingness to confront the inherent difficulty of relationship with the Other, who is always us, grounds the work in a somatic poetics that demands the reader pay attention." -- M. Nourbese Philip
“… are you creating demons/or maybe just writing poems?” When the poem is a spell, the poet does both: conjuring. In the startling Rock | Salt | Stone, Rosamond S. King calls demons of sudden, though long due violence; of folklore mashed up down the hold to be “mashed up” with what awaits on new shores; of perverse yearnings to pike transgressive sexuality on a cis-man’s index. King works hard magic in the smoke of this infernal manufactory, nose open for at least two kinds of salt, ears open to crack double-jointed syntax, eyes open to those who swear destroying her is divine. She sees them traveling their straight line—this bravura book of curses means to curve them." -- Douglas Kearney
"In Rock|Salt|Stone, poet, critic, artist, and activist Rosamond S. King creates and conjures the elemental, in form and language, into a stellar, black, queer womynist force. Traversing continents (Gambia, Trinidad and Tobago, the US), and a variety of idioms, King’s poems cast sparks, strike lightning. Showing how poetry can shift codes and embody experience, whether that of women coming out to their family and loving each other without fear, whether calling upon the deities or living and surviving chronic pain, King playfully sculpts with the tenderness of a razor, and she ain’t playing. Enter into these poems, and surrender to their spell. -- John Keene
[P] March 07, 2017 / Nightboat Books
0.3" H x 8.4" L x 6.4" W (0.5 lbs) 120 pages