• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About
  • Comment Policy
  • Nav Widget Area

    • Instagram
    • RSS
    • Twitter

Pretty Terrible

Pop Culture Criticism by Natalie Luhrs

You are here: Home / Book Reviews / The Poetry Project / The Poetry Project: Rose Lemberg

April 21, 2016

The Poetry Project: Rose Lemberg

Poetry Project Rose Lemberg

Rose Lemberg

Rose Lemberg is a queer, bigender immigrant from Eastern Europe and Israel. Rose’s work has appeared in Lightspeed’s Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Unlikely Story, Uncanny, and other venues. Rose is a Nebula Award nominee for their Birdverse novelette, “Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds”. Their works have also
won the Rannu competition, placed in the Rhysling award, and appeared on the Tiptree Longlist, among other honors. Rose’s debut poetry collection, Marginalia to Stone Bird, is available from Aqueduct Press (2016). Rose can be found on Twitter as @roselemberg, and on http://roselemberg.net.

Three Principles of Strong Building

One.
The earth is the foundation of the mind and the mind, of building.

The earth is mother, birthing stone from seed,
the earth is father, birthing seed from stone,
the earth is parent to the seed,
this moonstone shining with a latent gleam
invisible but to a mighty eye
that reads within each seed its ancestry
back to the dawn of time, before the first seed fell
into the endless void, creating land.

Two.
The earth, the mind, and a building are structured alike.

A latent grid, invisible to all
but the most powerful eye, that web of weights
unfelt, unknown but to a mighty mind:
it is upon a grid that names alight.

Read the rest at Strange Horizons.

Ah, this poem! It’s about names and building and magic and I don’t quite understand everything that is happening in it, but that is okay–it is about building things so they last and that is something that is very much after my heart these days. Lemberg’s voice is so precise and clear in all their work that I find myself willing to trust that I’ll end up in a better place than I was when I started. So far, I’ve never been lead astray.

  • “if all of her would turn to bees”, Through the Gate, September 2012
  • “Baba Yaga Tries to Donate Money”, Apex Magazine, July 2014
  • “The Law of Germinating Seeds”, Goblin Fruit, Fall 2014
  • “The rivers, the birchgroves, all the receding earth”, Strange Horizons, November 2014
  • “Archival Testimony Fragments/Minersong“, Uncanny, December 2015

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: The Poetry Project Natalie Luhrs

About Natalie Luhrs

I'm a lifelong geek with a passion for books and social justice.

Reader Interactions

The Poetry Project: M Sereno
Links Roundup: 04/22/16

Trackbacks

  1. The Poetry Project! - Pretty Terrible says:
    April 24, 2016 at 11:06 am

    […] April 21: Rose Lemberg […]

Primary Sidebar

Welcome

Hello! I’m Natalie Luhrs. I write about books and culture and whatever else strikes my fancy. I have so many opinions.

I was a nominee for the Best Fan Writer Hugo in 2017.

Search

Upcoming Conventions

None, because pandemic. Woe!

Support Pretty Terrible

Updates by Email

Blog posts, cat pictures, and other random things in email? Sign up here.
 

 

2021 Reading Challenge

2021 Reading Challenge

2021 Reading Challenge
Natalie has read 6 books toward their goal of 50 books.
hide
6 of 50 (12%)
view books

Recently Read

The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows
The Relentless Moon
A Wizard's Guide To Defensive Baking
Mischief
Architects of Memory
The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water
Unconquerable Sun
Bury Your Dead
The Brutal Telling
A Rule Against Murder
The Cruelest Month
A Fatal Grace
The Angel of the Crows
One Summer in Paris
Still Life
The Crossroads of Should and Must: Find and Follow Your Passion
Family for Beginners
The City We Became
Seven Sisters
The Harbors of the Sun


Natalie's favorite books »

Footer

Helpful Links

  • Home
  • About
  • Comment Policy
  • RSS - Posts

Archives

Looking for Something?

Recent Posts

  • Recent Reading, January 2021
  • Could I possibly catch a break now?
  • Some Positive News, For Once
  • Still Too Broken to Fix
  • Three Things Make A Post: August 17, 2020

Copyright © 2021 Natalie Luhrs · Pretty Happy On Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in
"It's chaos, be kind." Michelle McNamara

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.