Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive

WINNER, 2003 MEMBERS' CHOICE AWARD, ASIAN AMERICAN WRITERS' WORKSHOP

FINALIST, 2003 LITERARY AWARD, ASIAN AMERICAN WRITERS' WORKSHOP

Marking the intersection of traditional poetic craft and the raw energy of contemporary performance-based work, Patrick Rosal's poems ring with the music of no-frills industrial towns of northern New Jersey. In poems like “You Clubhouse Boys” and “A Good Day,” Rosal does time with B-boys and condemned men (whose misdeeds as youths forever shaped their futures). These portraits alternate with heated explorations of longing—sexual and filial—in pieces such as “The Basque Nose” and “Notes for the Unwritten Biography of My Father, an Ex-Priest,” while other poems dig deep into manhood and the poet’s Filipino roots. What unifies Rosal work—beyond his breathtaking capacity for rhythm—is a compassion that permeates even the most morally ambiguous situations. Unpredictable and breathtaking as a perfect sax solo, these poems are the indelible marks made by a world that has been simultaneously kept close and left behind.

Praise for Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive:

"[A]n astonishing first collection... Urgent, rhythmic (it has the swing without which it don't mean a thing), this is a passionate and elegiac book that claims a place of its own in American poetry's present and bodes well for American poetry's future." —Thomas Lux

"Part immigrant-song, bildungsroman, family-chronicle, and love story, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive is nearly overwhelming in its beauty. Rosal, almost sorcerous in his abilities, has called up a language, a hurricane, a world, a searing meditation...This is a book from whose pages you'll emerge (in no particular order): shaken, heartbroken, annealed, made new. A virtuoso performance!" —Junot Díaz

"Patrick Rosal's poems rush headlong toward your heart, baring what they know with a merciless candor that makes their compassion all the more persuasive. rosal's bottom-line love of language offers a feast of wards to surprise and pleasure the tongue. This is a bold, keen, powerful debut." —Joan Larkin

"Rosal is a second-generation Filipino whose heritage is a rich part of his work, but he is also an all-American urban kid...[with] the boastful beat of hipp-hop...playing in the back of his head...In Rosal's world, beauty and pleasure are contagious. So is the charm of his poetry." —Time Out New York