My new collection of poetry is a guide to living in the dictatorship of the new American plutocracy. I was born and raised in Romania, a national-socialist client of the Soviet empire, where poetry was always a nightmare for the state, and a lifeline to the terrified citizen. I emigrated to freedom in the U.S, where the subversive powers of poetry were slowly dissolving into badly-payed entertainment for easily distracted readers. The surveillance of the market wasn't yet as deadly as that of the communist censors, but their merger seems a done deal now. In the face of this civic catastrophy poetry has to be more than eau-de-cologne to dispel the stink of army boots. This book is occasionally clear about that, but there are also poems of love and the plague, childhood scents, the warmth of other bodies, the warnings of history, and the pleasure of making things up. I was taking photogaphs on my daily walks when writing these poems, without meaning to use them, but then I saw that they were strangely and not so strangely connected. My mother and father were photographers in the bad old days, I think their craft shadowed me. I dedicate these works to my predecessors:

tzara fondane celan

my dear anthologies
of gifts and misfortune
birth dates emigration dates
urgent breaks between wars
what is the plural of hiatus

illusions of freedom within
where the holes of culture used to be
now overgrown by words
tzara's good timing
the radical temperament of youth
your fucking bourgeois hypocrisy must die
fondane's bad timing
longing for summer pastures
i do mistake the pastoral for culture
these are my sheep
celan in the silence
after the apocalypse
translates the murmur
of the murdered mother tongue

The poet, when young, listened to a violinist practicing and wondered: “Could words as well be made to say the wordless?”

This question animates Keener Sounds: A Suite, a sequence of contemporary sonnets in which music as both subject and inspiration accompanies evocative explorations of love, grief, time, and memory. With a bold lyricism, Roger Greenwald makes the sonnet form his own, both vital and new. Paintings by Arielle Sandler serve as intermezzos between the sections of this moving poetic suite.

“In their formal elegance, the poems in Roger Greenwald’s Keener Sounds: A Suite recall Keats or Wordsworth, resisting and conforming to the sonnet form in ways that create, then complicate meaning. At the same time, these poems seem utterly contemporary. Smart, syntactically complex, and tonally various, this is a remarkable suite of sonnets.”
— Kevin Prufer

“In these often charged, emotionally resonant sonnets, Greenwald at once praises the tradition and critiques received ideas as he sings in Western poetry’s most lauded and accessible form.”
— Aliki Barnstone

“Greenwald composes with a rich emotional and intellectual vocabulary, and the music of his
poetry is haunting and beautiful. This is important work by a poet I admire.”
— Jay Parini

Roger Greenwald grew up in New York City. He attended The City College and the Poetry Project workshop at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, then completed graduate degrees at the University of Toronto, where he founded and edited the international literary annual WRIT Magazine.

His poetry has appeared in such journals as The World, Pleiades, Poetry East, The Spirit That Moves Us, The Texas Observer, Great River Review, Leviathan Quarterly, Exile Magazine, CNQ, Copper Nickel, The Massachusetts Review, The Manhattan Review, and Stand Magazine). He has published three previous books of poems: Connecting Flight (Williams-Wallace), Slow Mountain Train (Tiger Bark) and The Half-Life (Tiger Bark). He has won two CBC Literary Awards (for poetry and travel literature), the 2018 Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize, and the 2024 Littoral Press Poetry Prize, as well as many awards for his translations from Scandinavian languages.

Henry Murger is best known for writing the book and play that Giacomo Puccini used as the basis of his delicious opera La Bohème, later the source of Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent. In this collection, Zack Rogow has translated and adapted Murger’s best fiction in one volume. The title piece is The Water Drinkers, Murger’s satirical look at a real-life group of artists and writers who strongly rejected commercialism. They were “Water Drinkers” because they shunned the luxury of wine. Set in the colorful, unheated garrets so familiar to fans of La Bohème; in the galleries of the Louvre where young artists copied from the old masters; and in Paris’ fashionable quartiers, The Water Drinkers introduces us to a fascinating array of characters whose dilemmas resonate deeply with contemporary issues. Written with Murger’s sharp irony, The Water Drinkers is a little-known classic that has remained in print in France since its publication in 1854

Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of twenty books or plays. His eighth book of poems, Talking with the Radio: poems inspired by jazz and popular music, was published in 2015 by Kattywompus Press. He is also writing a series of plays about authors. The most recent of these, Colette Uncensored, had its first reading at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, and ran in San Francisco and Berkeley in 2016–17, and in London in 2018. His blog, Advice for Writers, has more than 200 posts on topics of interest to writers and more than 300,000 visits. Currently he serves as a contributing editor of Catamaran Literary Reader. 

www.zackrogow.com