Hindsight: Poems

By Rosanna Warren

Blending the personal and the political, the poems in Hindsight search for forms of the sacred in a time of torment. Some contemplate the shocks of COVID-19, others confront a politically torn nation. Each poem asks some version of the question, "What can be made of all this / grief." Beneath theology pulses the private life. Warren investigates a personal past to weigh the moral meaning of experience. In "Hindsight," the speaker discovers, "I could have / seen you better, I / know that now." Whom have we hurt? What does it mean to be conscious? From "Such Times"

There were laws to be smashed, a country intent
on doing just that. We lived in such times.
Still, in Prokofiev's piano sonata,
the notes kept rising like a vine on a trellis.
And that, too, was true. There was a way
in which it was true. But did
we hear?

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1324116951
• ISBN13: 9781324116950
• Release Date: September 2025
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 96 Pages