Cover Image:  West End of Provincetown Harbor (Photo by Jason Roush, 2004)	“In these spare and lyrical poems, Jason Roush writes, like the great Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, about the ordinary, passing moments of our lives, which are ‘suspended / over the swift water of years // that cannot last or happen again.’ These poems—at once so wry and conversational, so ardent and precise and unafraid of feeling—remind us in their beauty that we are all living in the ‘breezeway of time,’ in that long, open passage between all that seems lost and all that still remains.” —Richard McCann, author of Mother of Sorrows     “‘Should we / take a breath / or not? / Make music // broken or contained?’ asks Jason Roush near the end of Breezeway. Throughout this collection, Roush has consistently shown deliberation, and deliberateness, to be musical: his lines, beautifully broken, are shapely containers of his syntax. For him, the lyric impulse is alive and well, and Breezeway affords the reader an unhurried and expansive pleasure that is nearly extinct in our electronic age. Orchestrating echoes of predecessors from Plath to Cavafy—and Hofmannsthal, in two astonishing translations—this poet writes with a quietude and precision that confer the patina of history upon even the most contemporary subject matter. Whether in the guise of a flâneur who sees a drag queen’s ‘blue kimono / serenad[ing] summer’s end’ or contemplating B-movies from the eighties, Roush slows the language down, burnishing each word so that thought and remembrance become vehicles of beauty.” —Christina Pugh, author of Restoration
Jason Roush teaches writing, literature, and cultural studies at Emerson College and New England Institute of Art. His poems, criticism, and other writings have appeared in Best Gay Poetry 2008, Bay Windows, Breakwater Review, Brooklyn Review, Cimarron Review, Expression Magazine, The Fossil Record, The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, The James White Review, Lambda Book Report, Out Magazine, Provincetown Magazine, RFD (Radical Faerie Digest), 236, Verse Daily, and the anthology This New Breed: Gents, Bad Boys and Barbarians 2 . He is the author of two other books of poetry, After Hours (2005) and Crosstown (2009). He can be reached via e-mail at: ProfRoush@aol.com (Web text and images protected under copyright, 2010)	(Author Photo by Paul Rivenberg, 2006)