My BOOKS
Bone of My Bone
"Bone of My Bone by Nicole Rollender is one of three 2015 chapbook contest winners with Blood Pudding Press. The book is tangibly pleasurable, from the artwork to the lacy binding – one hundred percent objet d’art. It’s a meaningful contrast to the poems within; poems that are bodily rooted in the physical world, but push against the metaphysical as a thematic motif of the Liturgy of the Hours. “Bone of My Bone” is an anxious reckoning of grief and hope, of motherhood and the body, in a way that is reminiscent of Louise Gluck’s The Wild Iris. Rollender’s work inhabits a physical space, but never stops circling around the question of what exists after the body does not."
~Lauren Gordon, Fiddle is Flood
Ghost Tongue
"What breathtaking poems Nicole Rollender writes! I read her poems and feel the air sucked from my body, and if I read them again, I feel the same profound rush, the same exquisite anxiety. But don’t let the rush of this poet’s brilliance fool you into thinking she doesn’t know her craft—she works the language with precision, with imagery that is both dreamlike and exacting. To know this poet’s work is to know a certain kind of magic that leaves a reader achingly satisfied."
—Allison Joseph, author of Mortal Rewards and My Father’s Kites
Absence of Stars
"I’ve found myself wondering what it is about some of Nicole Rollender’s poetry that appeals to me so strongly – and I think a large part of it is because, not only is her writing style unique and emotional and visceral, there is also nothing black and white or right and wrong about her content. It is mentally connected and haunted in both light and dark ways. It is questioning (of the past, present and future), female body-based (including discomfort associated with parts of the living body combined with joy for parts of what the body can do combined with pain and what the body can handle and how it can unexpectedly malfunction), and drawn to another dimension in a haunted sort of way."
~Juliet Cook, Blood Pudding Press