The last thing New & selected poems

Rosal, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim fellow, has long embraced the "shapeshifting, elusive, lethal, polyglottal, elaborate, sometimes gorgeous improvisations of material-at-hand" to generate poetry that explodes the rigid expectations of language as experienced by a lineage of immigrants. Drawing on his Filipino heritage and urban East Coast upbringing, Rosal's poems depict rowdy, late-night scrambles to evade the police as readily as awkwardly tender moments. He is especially adept at forcing readers to confront the way empire infiltrates and disfigures family dynamics, including how three of his great uncles were hanged by for armed resistance to the American occupation of the Philippines. It's breathtaking to track the evolution of Rosal's work through time, from roughhousing, streetwise lyrics about breakdancing from Rosal's debut collection, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (2003) to the fresh rhythms of Brooklyn Antediluvian (2016). "We are the halo-halo men // the mix-mix men the fresh-cut- / mango in your mouth men." The new poems crackle with that same energy, interrupted by moments of softer insight, as when sadness is a ghost town with one hotel inhabited by a girl wielding a French horn ("a little dazzling galaxy / of voluptuous metal").