Natural Life With No Parole by Sarah Rossiter

There is good reason why the word “heart” emerges frequently in Rossiter’s luminous collection Natural Life With No Parole: her wise and tender apprehensions occur in unison with a pulsating world—a world where “everything changes… “a summer place/We dwell in for a certain season.” But what a place it is: “ribbons of unfolding light”, as if a river for the “unimpeded heart”. So, read slowly and deeply: you will feel your pulse perpetuating the rhythms of this poet’s delicate lines.
–Sofia M. Starnes Poet Laureate of Virginia, 2012-2014, Author of Fully Into Ashes and other works. Poetry Editor of the Anglican Theological Review

Sarah Rossiter’s poems, anchored in the world of images yet always reaching to connect with something larger than themselves, point to the mystery in the beach fog, or in the wasp’s crawl into the dark, or in the apparition of the Virgin Mary on the freezer door. In her poems, lyric breaths of particularity, things which anchor us disappear, fear rises, and the images of death and TV ads form jarring juxtapositions. After all, the rise and fall of the tides link our lives and deaths to a rhythmic and inevitable reality. Yet Rossiter reaches beyond to glimpses of grace and aching beauty, the hope of resurrection, and the sudden appearance of a “secret sun-lit world” even in the deepest snow.
–Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner: Poetry editor of The Christian Century, Author of What Cannot Be Fixed : The Poiema Poetry Series