The Theme of Tonight's Party Has Been Changed

What I love about Dana Roeser's poems is the way they unfold—beginning with the first glimpse; their formal or 'razored' look on the page—and how these energetic narratives split into complexities of rhetoric and landscape—fictions full of characters the poet presents in a full-blown orchestration of the self that is anything but ordinary or self-indulgent. Halfway through a typical Roeser poem I find my breathing has been changed—I'm that caught up in the performance and the story. There is a plushly confessional core to the poems, and yet the self-deprecating humor and the velocity—I'd call this Roeser's Voice—save them from any possibility of bathos. Instead, I end up feeling moved beyond measure by this poet's spirit, as reflected in the poems, in the face of failures and unrelenting desire. A lyric poet who writes narrative poems, Dana Roeser is a poet who transcends classification.'—David Dodd Lee
'Dana Roeser's The Theme of Tonight's Party Has Been Changed is a tour de force, a book of startling, almost dizzying, juxtapositions, wide in scope and deep in feeling. Roeser's poems remind me a little of A.R. Ammons's, concerned as they are with mirroring the rapid, unpredictable movement of the mind as it finds similarity in dissimilarity, always the poet's task. The pleasure in reading these poems may be in the way they both amuse and alarm as they capture the texture and split focus of contemporary experience where two, three, or four things must be held in the mind simultaneously, often at the poet's peril. I admire the honesty of these poems, their craft, risk-taking, and seriousness. No poet I can think of writes better about the anxiety that fuels modern life.'—Elizabeth Spires
'Dana Roeser is an aficionado of fear. Radical anxiety flows into every corner of experience for this poet, and becomes a lifestyle. Desperation is daily. 'I // wake in the dark / trying to assemble // a lexicon, / to make a coherent // line—in the dark / I scratched // words on top of each / other on a // pad by the bed / 'Torture, / torture, torture.' At the time / I thought it // brilliant.' If you find that passage thrillingly alive and nervy and funny and scary, then Dana Roeser is a poet for you to check out. She's no smoothie, and no chicken-disjunctivist. She is an existential protester.'—Mark Halliday
'From Mass to twelve-step meetings, voodoo dolls to rosary beads, the poems in Dana Roeser's The Theme of Tonight's Party Has Been Changed are concerned finally with 'the corporeal self'—vulnerable and resilient. Roeser is a poet of fierce intelligence and high creative metabolism, and there is unmistakable urgency in these narratives, the poems' structures expansive, 'stealthy, labyrinthine,' and irresistible.'—Claudia Emerson
'These poems drew me in, kept me listening, with their sharp incidents, their quick-stitched lines, their methods of connecting disparate memories: they are conversations, remembered monologues, places of ordinary terror—wind farms and sand dunes in middle America, a beach abroad and a Target near home, where 'a fan, a// hair dryer, an air-conditioner,' 'random cheap household/ items' betoken exceptional sadness. Roeser's long braids of quips and demotic confessions outline exceptional efforts at being an adult, at trying to be good, along with remarkable figures for them: 'the/ layer of turbulence/ right after takeoff,' for example, 'that made the/ plane feel like a/ pair of metal pancake/ spatulas rubber- banded/ together, flapping/ in a high wind.' Her paradoxically conversational lines handle extraordinary difficulties—addictions and remedies both false and true, the years-long troubles of a globetrotting daughter. But they can handle the ordinary too: here is your life, they say, cut up and reassembled with such acuity that you can put it together, can handle it, once more.'—Stephen Burt
'Nothing is cute about Roeser's latest collection; concise poems doing their job—lifting us up from a place of heartbreak and loss with real-life challenges and suspense. From 12-step meetings to memories of the dead to meandering thoughts and moments between mothers and daughters—these lines are for all readers. Roeser reminds us life isn't about what we plan. For that we are grateful. Chosen one of '30 Amazing Poetry Titles.''—Library Journal
'Beginning and ending with petitions to a higher power, this collection sends up an honest prayer, pleading that for the ones we love, everything will turn out all right.'—Publishers Weekly