The New York Times Book Review of Hometown for an Hour

“Poetry Chronicle”
April 23, 2006

Rose has so much flair for figurative language she could probably make her living as a sidewalk similist, telling amused tourists what they remind her of:

“Poplars waved their white-gloved leaves like royalty.
A viceroy pumped its bellows then became the flame.
White butterflies flapped dollhouse sheets above the flower heads
like Goldilocks looking for the right size bed.”

She could go on all day like this, and occasionally she seems to. In a few of these “postcard” poems, Rose's ingenious comparisons don't add up to much more than stacks of themselves. But over the course of the collection her restlessness—both her physical divagations and her mind's associative flitting—becomes increasingly affecting. Personal tragedies, including the suicide of her mother, have left the speaker in these poems with a permanent sense of deracination:

“Home is still
a tidal flat, unbuildable.”

At such moments, the book's breezy postcard conceit turns bone-chilling.

New York Times Book Review
April 23, 2006