Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive
Patrick Rosal

Winner of the 2002 Members Choice Award from the Asian American Writers Workshop

Patrick Rosal’s poetry rings with the music of no-frills industrial towns of central New Jersey. Portraits of hip-hoppers and condemned men (whose misdeeds as boys forever shape their futures) alternate with dynamic riffs on longing—sexual and filial—and on the poet’s Filipino roots. Unpredictable and breathtaking as a sax solo, these poems are the indelible marks made by a world that has been simultaneously kept close and left behind. 

“[A] book from whose pages you'll emerge shaken, heartbroken, annealed, made new.”
—Junot Díaz

“[An] astonishing first collection by a young poet of immense gifts.”
—Thomas Lux

Patrick Rosal is the author of the collections My American Kundiman,  Boneshepherds, and Brooklyn Antediluvian. He teaches in the creative writing program at Rutgers–Camden and lives in Philadelphia.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can. $21.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-293-1 / 68 Pages / Poetry