Chouteau's Chalk

The lush sounds of the poems in Rosa Lane’s Chouteau’s Chalk make even the silent reader’s ears perk up. Her words wind us feverishly through landscapes of initiation, those early erotic encounters so impressed upon our being that we can only look back and say ‘hello, me.’ The spaces here are sometimes wounding, 'outlined in neon, a noble gas, atomic, orange,' or 'a blur, a fallen entity / inside the house,' but like all freedom songs, they map the road taken. Here that road is queerly, wildly, sweetly taken, 'zipping us all the way down the beck.'

In Chouteau's Chalk, Rosa Lane becomes a lionhearted singer of the erotic: as life force, as madness, as mentor, as inventor. Here the body speaks its truth, even as it is fragmented and mocked by commerce, billboard glitter, the cynical commodification of the body. Lane's technical mastery serves the fierce music of these poems, which, like desire itself, did bring me to my knees.

* author of American Dream with Exit Wound *

It's heartening to see a bold collection of poems like Rosa Lane's, remarkable for the inventive language and for a direct and natural representation of the lives of women passionately in love with women.

* author of Unions *

Rosa Lane’s Chouteau’s Chalk is poetry to learn poetry from, perfectly catching the web of nature that is outside and inside us at the same time, continually reflecting and notifying our lives. Then she has placed this in the context of living myth and literature, animated by desire, love, and grief. A sumptuous feast.

* author of Hanging on Our Own Bon