The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Holding my Selves Together by Margaret Rozga

This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Callista Buchen, is from Holding my Selves Together by Margaret Rozga, released by Cornerstone Press in 2021.

The Plot

Scatter seeds freely
on newly-awakened soil.

Some won’t take root. Some will
feed nuthatches and sparrows.
Some will be pulled, mistaken for weeds,
some arrested in a sudden late freeze

or washed away by flood
or starved in drought:
always some chance slip or stop.

All you need is enough green
through the mud of spring

to feel as if
you won’t go into the cold
without anything at all.

Margaret Rozga’s fifth book is Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press, 2021). Two of her previous books were named Outstanding Achievements in Poetry by the Wisconsin Library Association in the years of their publication. As 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, she co-edited the anthology Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems (Art Night Books, 2020) and the chapbook anthology On the Front Lines / Behind the Lines (pitymilkpress, 2021). In 2021 she served as the inaugural artist/scholar at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee at Waukesha Field Station and is currently working on a book of poems inspired by the Field Station’s ninety acres of restored prairie.

Callista Buchen is the author of the full-length collection Look Look Look (Black Lawrence Press, 2019), and the chapbooks The Bloody Planet (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) and Double-Mouthed (dancing girl press, 2016). Her work appears in Harpur Palate, Puerto del Sol, Fourteen Hills, and many other journals. She is the winner of the DIAGRAM’s essay contest and the C.D Wright conference’s Emerging Writer award, and is the founder of the Carlson-Stauffer Reading Series at Franklin College.