Omega’s Garden

The poems in this chapbook ruminate on loss, on broken relationships with family, lovers, and the self but look to the natural world for hope and redemption.

Published in 2012 by Finishing Line Press.

Praise:

“You do not want to miss this book’s intense language, its extraordinary original imagery and the rawness of Omega’s Garden’s situations. The diction is compelling—earth’s destruction: ‘…screaming fish, / mired birds’ / beaks glued shut.’ War: ‘…not rain / shards of mirror / fall from the sky fall / through earth / a failure of belief…’ Colloquially about broken love: ‘…he cups her breasts /with those hands I’ve loved for years.’ A book for the leading ranks of American poetry.”
—Maxwell CorydonWheat, Jr., First Poet Laureate, Nassau County, New York

“Rosalind Brenner’s poems look to the natural world for redemption. Many are tuned to a stuttering rhythm that both displays her gift for description and befits the broken human relationships this book examines: ‘green life lambent sun salt air’ sound just lovely; and then: ‘In a shapely V / the geese leave / too.’ Throughout, a first-person speaker learns, again and again, that ‘I slept with a thing I misconstrued / as tenderness.’”
—Julie Sheehan, Professor, Creative Writing, MFA, Stony Brook Southampton

“The poems in Omega's Garden are ruminations on getting through life one day at a time. Here is a world full of broken promises, failed relationships and loss. But it is also a world where forgiveness prevails in order to create a thematic expanse where roses grow and geese create ‘a choir / trumpeting huzzahs.’ This new world needs to flourish - no wonder the speaker creates a colloquial grace to every line.”
—Kevin Pilkington, author of In the Eyes of a Dog and Summer Shares

“I've been following Rosalind Brenner’s work for many years. It feels like some small justice has been brought to the world now that we have this collection of poems between covers. Omega’s Garden chronicles injustice in ways few poets can. The injustice of life, mates, parents, and the self—it’s all here in burning emotion and arresting language. Redemption usually comes with survival, but Brenner has achieved more. She has shown that we can make it through and has shared the journey with us via these fine poems.”
—Ron Egatz, author of Beneath Stars Long Extinct