Theodora Goss’ work has been appearing in print for about four years and she’s fresh and inviting on every level.  Small Beer Press, who are wonderful in all ways – an independent press that publishes brilliant work that would terrify the evil corporate conglomerates if it were a fair and decent world, was the first publisher to collect her wise enchantments.  (Prime Books is releasing a collection called In the Forest of Forgetting later in 2006.)

              To just lean in and listen to the whispers of the poems in The Rose in Twelve Petals (mind you, the stories are just as permanent and stirring), the language, fervor and intent are all dark, meticulous and graceful.  Some are reprinted from the “tiny but celebrated” (The Washington Post) Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, which is also edited and published by Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link’s Small Beer Press and worth a subscription for anyone who loves magic and myth and the cutting edge of stories, ideas and poems, and some are from The Journal of Mythic Arts, but, collected, these poems show that they belong everywhere.

Please buy the reprint rights to print them on placards so you can post them on the rides of that loud carnival across the street.  Every line is balanced, fierce and pregnant with depth and meaning.  It wouldn’t be false to call her talents eternal.

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