Ruth Rosengarten's Over, resumes, initiates and wraps a sequence that is both the narrative and index of a physical life: increments of being and sensing in time with others of many kinds. As the epigraphs, from Sharon Olds and Annie Ernaux, suggest, this is a collection led by vulnerability and poetry , equally so.
----Bhanu Kapil
Over, is utterly compelling in its lyrical and meticulous exploration of memory, longing, and self. In this beautifully controlled sestude sequence, Ruth Rosengarten has found a way to hold containment and abandon in a tight embrace. Spare, precise and searing, with observations that land like electric shocks, Over, is remarkable.
----Hannah Copley
Over, brings a forensic, unself-pitying intelligence to bear upon the wake of a relationship summarily ended by the other party. Erudite, engaging, affecting, it offers a looping anti-narrative that is utterly absorbing, picking over the silage in a series of sestudes, drawing us ever closer into its profound consideration of memory, desire, ageing and the corrosions of the virtual world.
----Meryl Pugh
Ruth Rosengarten’s enthralling odyssey through rage, healing, and bleak reflection is lit from within by a brilliant choice of form: the sestude, a prose block just enough to ward off silence, never enough to wholly comfort: they form an archipelago of islands on which the heart can neither rest easy nor dwell long in the present – let alone the past, or dreams – the perfect topography for the poet’s unflinching, unconsoling gaze.
----Glyn Maxwelll
In 2022, this book, while in the early stages of its development, was shortlisted for the Discoveries Prize (the Women’s Prize’s writer development programme)..
