PRAISE FOR REFERENTIAL BODY

Rosie's work is devastatingly honest, but rife with levity. These poems articulate pain with candor while bravely retaining the space for joy and for humor. Rosie is a poet who is able to capture something very genuine and  human, and to communicate it to the page with all its truthful chaos intact. 

— Julien Baker

Rosie Accola’s poems double as a playlist, a cosmo article, a confessional booth, or a literary analysis of a book you haven’t read yet but suddenly want to. The poems in this collection are like those mirrors that show your face so closely that you can count each pore, and you end up having to laugh. They’re proof that there is weird joy in our discomfort and always a reason to kiss and be kissed. 

— Scout Kelly

Rosie Accola’s collection of poems is a testament to how friendship can form and build your own survival. “All I’m trying to do is emit light.” She says, a quarter of the way in, and she does. In “Referential Body” Rosie welcomes the reader to a world where the idea of their own honest hope is not a longing, but an incessant need, through her detailed experience of seeing the world for just a little bit more than what it is by pulling you to the present moment. By capturing specific moments in time, whether they entail grief and uncertainty, sacred queer joy, or platonic intimacy, Rosie’s words accompany the feelings that demand to be felt in a comfortable wisdom of what it means to navigate a conscious awareness of growing older as a young person.

— Morgan Martinez