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O Western Wind
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781643176444
Publisher: Parlor Press
Published: Jan 5 2027
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.26
Height: 0.19 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Free Verse Editions
Edited by Jon Thompson
Where better to find freedom than within constraint? Such is the idea behind O Western Wind, the wild, witty, and winsome product of Kathleen Rooney's taking one word per day from the anonymous sixteenth-century poem Westron Wynde and writing a brand-new poem for each of them. A love of language and laughter animates each piece, blended with a melancholy awareness of our living in an era of monstrous grief and widespread loss: of democracy, of plants, of animals, and of trust, but never of hope. Motivated by joy and curiosity but cut with the sadness of the world, these poems demand your reflection and provoke your amusement. We will never know the identity of that long-ago poem's author, but Rooney invites us to adore them and their ineffable small rain.
Among its constant, capricious, and nearly arbitrary discoveries works an unswerving intellect committed to the pleasures of thinking freely. It left me after a number of readings saying, again and again, HURRAH! -Rodney Jones, author of Elegy for the Southern Drawl and Judge, New Measure Poetry Prize
I love the architecture of this book, which manages to be in turns whimsical and sorrowful, etymological and intimate, and to reach back through time toward a sixteenth-century, unattributed poem while remaining contemporary in voice, subject, and form. The book becomes a portrait of a mind in motion, in a meditative collaboration, chronologically, with every single word in the poem. 'O' is an anaphoric litany that ranges from playfulness to mortality. Other words, like 'Western, ' beg for scene-making. 'When' becomes an incremental meditation on time. I experience a great tenderness here toward the deep roots of poetry itself. -Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry
O Western Wind is a vivid meditation on the ephemeral beauty of being. Inspired by the sixteenth-century poem Westron Wynde, Rooney's witty and observant speaker transforms each word of the original into a glissando of rain [giving] way to the pecking beaks of pizzicato violins. By way of humor and dreamlike, associative leaps, Rooney invites us to the place where love, nature, and human yearning meet across centuries. This is fresh, energizing work from one of our keenest voices. -Kiki Petrosino, author of Perfect Italian
O, gloriously Nude Formalist mishmash of philosophy, lyric utterance,
pataquerical slapstick, and ventriloquized rapture
O, fractured fairy tales
O, nonstop aphorism machine
O, words tripping on tongue's eye
O, ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor
O, sage advice for rosemary and time
O, ethics without truth and truth without ethics
O, winds that wind way wound whither, hither, and nigh
This isn't the end, it's the in-between
'O, how I hate accepting things I cannot change!' -Charles Bernstein, author of The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. Her fifth novel, Man Overboard! (Gallery Books) came out in 2026, and her poetry collection Where Are the Snows (Texas Review Press) won the XJ Kennedy Prize in 2022.
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