Sarah Rosenthal appeared in Issue 20 with Riff or Rift and My Nudity Blows the World Apart, two prose poems in which ordinary speech and domestic space become charged with risk, desire, and sudden shifts of meaning.
Sarah Rosenthal in the historical archive
Issue 20’s contributor note records recent poems and fiction in Aufgabe, VeRT, and Xcp, along with interviews with Bay Area writers published in Jacket and Rain Taxi. The note closes on morning light casting shadows through blinds, an image that fits the poems’ attention to rooms and perception.
Riff or Rift
The poem begins with a mouth bursting into flames and immediately turns toward “careful usage.” A list of formerly easy phrases gives way to a new vocabulary of locks, fiddlers, books, hills, dales, and transfers. Speech becomes a field where ordinary words suddenly carry consequences.
My Nudity Blows the World Apart
A literary conversation on a chaise lounge moves into seduction, interruption, hiding, drink, and exposure. The speaker’s nakedness becomes both physical fact and social crisis, while the room keeps changing its meaning around her.
Library, room, and person
The poem’s footnote imagines a library of love and asks whether the speaker might be a librarian, a room, or a person inside someone else’s desire. The domestic interior becomes an unstable metaphor for identity and expectation.
Language, exposure, and social space
Across both poems, Rosenthal makes speech and setting equally volatile. A phrase can burn, a living room can become a scene of concealment, and a familiar object can suddenly reveal how people assign roles to one another.
Further reading
Continue through the archive’s guide to imagery in poetry, its page on sound in poetry, and its overview of modern poetry.