last confession_F

last confession by Frank Rossini

ISBN: 978-0-9839092-3-1
Paperback 120 pages $18
Distributed by Small Press Distribution

Publication Date March 15, 2021

(advance copies available now)

Frank Rossini was born in 1946 in the Flushing section of New York City. He attended Catholic schools for 16 years, graduating from Fordham University with a B.A in English. He began a 43-year career in education as a student teacher in Roxbury, Massachusetts & a student in Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. He also began writing song lyrics with a boyhood friend, Tom Intondi, a singer/songwriter on the Greenwich Village folk music scene. Along the way, he met Tom Weatherly, the author of Mau Mau American Cantos, who encouraged him to write poetry. In 1972, he moved to Eugene, Oregon where he taught in a program for young migrant farmworkers at the University of Oregon & completed a Masters of Education & an MFA in Creative Writing. From 1980 to 2010, he was an instructor at Lane Community College, working with adult learners. He has written & published poetry in various journals over the past fifty years. Silverfish Review published a chapbook of his poems, sparking the rain, in 1979. In 2012, sight | for | sight books published a limited edition book of his poems, midnight the blues, which focuses on his long love of jazz that began with a spiritual awakening at midnight on January 1, 1968 while listening to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme for the first time. He lives with his wife, Lynn Nakamura, & their dog, Camas, on a small piece of land on the edge of Eugene, where he writes, listens to jazz, & tends a “wild garden.”

Praise for last confession

Every moment that invites poetry is a confession of sorts. We confess that we are utterly human in our trials. We slide off the edge of the world, or we climb back up toward a grace that imparts fresh vision and new songs. Frank Rossini's poems are born of stories that emerge from the city-earth of New York City, in the wake of Walt Whitman's long songs. Rossini is a collector of jazz tunes, elegant and noisy birds, and those sacred moments often left behind in the mundane tide of forgetfulness. These poems will remind you that the art of listening is perhaps the greatest art.
—Joy Harjo, poet, musician, performer

In his poem, “mowing” Frank Rossini writes “I know the time/ for first mowing/ I’ve learned/ the subtle swale/ how different grasses respond/ to the blades.” I love these lines because, like so many of the poems of last confession, they tell us how such knowledge is earned by a lifetime of observation and interaction. Whether he’s writing movingly of his childhood in New York, or his home and family in the present, Rossini’s poetry opens to the world around him, attuned to both harmony and dissonance in the beat of his distinctive timing, as form embodies feeling come vibrantly alive in these wonderful poems.
— Maxine Scates, author of Undone and Black Loam

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last confession by Frank Rossini

last confession by Frank Rossini

Praise for last confession