Why Can't It Be Tenderness

Charting a journey through schoolyards and laundromats, suburban gardens and rice paddies, yoga studios and rural highways, Michelle Brittan Rosado crafts poems that blend elegy and praise. In settings from California to Malaysian Borneo, and the wide Pacific between them, she explores themes of coming-of-age, mixed-race identity, diaspora, and cultural inheritance. With empathy for the generations past, she questions how we might navigate our history to find a way through it, still holding on to the ones we love. Like an ocean wave, these poems recede and return, with gratitude for the quotidian and for beauty found even in fragments.bring me backto the in-betweenwhere my breathhas always lived,without containment,like two legs pointingtoward the ocean, or these armsreaching into sky―excerpt from "Ode to the Double 'L'" Michelle Brittan Rosado. All rights reserved.