I bow and hand Sensei her arrows. All but one that I can't find, though I combed the long grass with my fingers. One arrow gone. Perhaps underground you hold it in your hand against the broken dawn. You are the wandering arrow, the bow unstrung. Your sudden absence has startled the partridges from the plums. --from Haiku of the Lost Arrow

Rachel Rose is the author of four collections of poetry and a memoir, The Dog Lover Unit: Lessons in Courage from the World’s K9 Cops (St. Martin’s Press), which was shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis award for best non-fiction crime book in 2018. She is also the recipient of the Bronwen Wallace Award for fiction from The Writers’ Trust, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, a 2014 and 2016 Pushcart Prize and a 2016 nomination for a Governor General’s Award. She is the Poet Laureate Emerita of Vancouver, poetry editor at Cascadia Magazine and a contributor for Maisonneuve Magazine. Rose’s work has appeared in numerous anthologies and publications including The Globe & Mail, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Malahat Review, Rattle, New Quarterly, Best Canadian Poetry, Monte Cristo Magazine and the Vancouver Sun. She lives in Vancouver, BC.

Rachel Rose's profile page

"Fierce poems speaking out against the anonymity enforced by indifference, abuse, and sheer mortality. Fierce in their plain speaking, but not at all plain in their musicality. A lushness of imagery, passionate cadences, a voice that witnesses pain even as it celebrates love in all its guises. Rachel Rose has written an extraordinarily clear-eyed first book." Daphne Marlatt. "In images both harrowing and beautiful, always 'Luminescent/under the meat', this work moves me profoundly, as it disturbs." Mary di Michele. "Rachel Rose is writing a poetry of intense witness and emotional drive, always marked by the distinctive tang of raw experience and the sort of wisdom which can only be learned by a heart that is fully engaged." Don McKay.

"Fierce poems speaking out against the anonymity enforced by indifference, abuse, and sheer mortality. Fierce in their plain speaking, but not at all plain in their musicality. A lushness of imagery, passionate cadences, a voice that witnesses pain even as it celebrates love in all its guises. Rachel Rose has written an extraordinarily clear-eyed first book." Daphne Marlatt.
"In images both harrowing and beautiful, always ‘Luminescent/under the meat', this work moves me profoundly, as it disturbs." Mary di Michele.
"Rachel Rose is writing a poetry of intense witness and emotional drive, always marked by the distinctive tang of raw experience and the sort of wisdom which can only be learned by a heart that is fully engaged." Don McKay.