Books by Jay Rogoff

George Balanchine, one of the twentieth century's foremost choreographers, strove to make music visible through dance. In The Art of Gravity, Jay Rogoff extends this alchemy into poetry, discovering in dancing the secret rhythms of our imaginations and the patterns of our lives.

In lyric poetry with the dramatic sweep of a historical novel, Jay Rogoff's Enamel Eyes, a Fantasia on Paris, 1870 reimagines "the terrible year" when the Franco-Prussian War shook the City of Lights. Using multiple voices and poetic forms, Rogoff skilfully recreates the wonder and horror of these months of siege.

The poems in Jay Rogoff's Venera explore varieties of love, both sacred and profane, by drawing from the natural world, personal intimacy, and the human imagination as evoked in biblical narratives and art.

In The Long Fault, Jay Rogoff explores how the disasters of human history scar the individual psyche and how our creative acts of art and love help us to resist this damage. After opening with Cain launched into exile-"from the good book hurled / out to beget the world"-Rogoff then sweeps us along in his imaginative wanderings, pondering our mortality through the means and powers poetry makes available. The poems explore sacred and secular history, including wars as ancient as Troy and as contemporary as Iraq, and incidents of mass violence from the Middle Ages to modern times. They simultaneously enlist the power of all forms of art as an ally in confronting disaster and helping us proceed.