Call Me When You Get to Rosie's

Poetry. Winner of the 2016 Bitter Oleander Library of Poetry Award (BOPLOPA). CALL ME WHEN YOU GET TO ROSIE'S by Austin LaGrone is a small package of poems which exudes a swollen intensity towards life and how it has encountered the poet. Everything is in play for LaGrone, as in the back- cover comment by the poet Ronnie Yates: "These poems—an efflorescence of rogues, carnies, workers and mystics, all brandishing the ordinary talismans of the last junk shop in the Marigny, poems, which, as Austin once told me, he writes then whittles down to chicken bones—speak in the tongues of men and angels and strumpets in kimonos patrolling sun-lit prison yards, poems which radiate, rot and stink sweet among their reedy contemporaries. Austin tells us where we can find him, he's with her 'in the back pocket of the Oldsmobile.' 'I want to poke her with a cheap umbrella,' he admits, 'beneath a mutual communion of stars.' He'll poke you and you'll look up to receive the bread of the body and sidereal wine."