Venera

Praise for Jay Rogoff"[Rogoff's] poetry takes a visible art of movement and translates the feelings it evokes and the history it records into delicate words...But Rogoff also has an amazing knack for the humor in humanity, as a slew of death-defying poems demonstrates." —Andrew Burstein, The Baton Rouge Advocate"Quite simply, I love the gravitational, poetic pull of Rogoff 's work." —Rene E. D'Aoust, Notre Dame ReviewThe poems in Jay Rogoff's Venera explore varieties of love, both sacred and profane, by drawing from the natural world, personal intimacy, and the human imagination as evoked in biblical narratives and art. Rogoff reveals how devotion's many guises collide to startle us: a husband consoles his wife after she is awakened by an imaginary child, a man daydreams of his kindergarten crush, Abraham's fear of God perplexes his love for Isaac, and the Virgin Mary, stunned by the angel Gabriel's inhuman beauty, contemplates the decades of...