Lizard

Overview

In Lizard, Rosenthal explores the creaturely membranes that lie between the knownsocial and the unknownsocial. When racified nations, nationified peoples, and “selfevident” identities of every make threaten to squash the efflorescence of Life’s lusty reach toward the stars, Lizard is born and scampers about. But Rosenthal’s sense of Fable eschews morals and maxims in favor of claiming a terrain from which the ParaHuman can come into being. Slowly, tentatively, and then brashly, Lizard begins to obverse the world (while keenly observed herself). The resulting Kabbalistic strokes are as patently hilarious as they are intelligently perplexing. This is bone instructive poetry. I love it. — Rodrigo Toscano

Author Biography

Sarah Rosenthal is the author of Estelle Meaning Star (Chax, forthcoming 01/01/2024), Lizard (Chax, 01/01/2016), and Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 01/01/2009) as well as two books in collaboration with Valerie Witte: One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life Through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer (punctum, forthcoming 01/01/2024) and The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (The Operating System, 01/01/2019). Her chapbooks include we could hang a radical panel of light (Drop Leaf, 01/01/2022), Fire and Flood (above/ground, 01/01/2021), Estelle Meaning Star (above/ground, 01/01/2014), disperse (Dusie, 01/01/2014), The Animal (in collaboration with artist Amy Fungyi Lee, Dusie, 2011), How I Wrote This Story (Margin to Margin, 2001), sitings (a+bend, 2000), and notchicago (Melodeon, 01/01/1998). She edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 01/01/2010). Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Elderly, Dream Pop, Miracle Monocle, All the Sins, Eleven Eleven, Sidebrow, Zen Monster, Otoliths, eccolinguistics, textsound, and Little Red Leaves, and is anthologized in The Beautiful: Poets Reimagine a Nation (Gualala Arts, 01/01/2022), Kindergarde: Avantgarde Poems, Plays, and Stories for Children (Black Radish, 01/01/2013), Building is a Process / Light is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim (PQueue, 01/01/2008), Bay Poetics (Faux, 01/01/2006), The Other Side of the Postcard (City Lights, 01/01/2004), and hinge (Crack, 2002). Her essays and interviews have appeared in journals such as Jacket, Denver Quarterly, Rain Taxi, New American Writing, and How2. Her chapbook manuscript How Will You Move: Including All of Us in the Dance was a 01/01/2020 Gold Line Press Chapbook Finalist. Her film We Agree on the Sun, made in collaboration with Ayana YonesakaRuiz, Jonah Belsky, and Ames Tierney, includes excerpts from How Will You Move; it has received accolades from numerous film festivals, including Best Experimental Short, Berlin Independent Film Festival; Winner, Dance Short, Rotterdam Independent Film Festival; and Best Experimental Short, Dubai Indie Film Festival. A second film, Lizard Song Cycle, is currently in postproduction. Innovation Grant, a San Francisco Education Fund Grant, and grantsupported writing residencies at This Will Take Time, Hambidge, New York Mills, Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain, and Ragdale. From 01/01/2009–2011 she was an Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts. She is a Life & Professional Coach and project manager at Collaborative Classroom. She serves on the California Book Awards poetry jury.