If I Love You

Advance praise for If I Love You.

“If you really want to know exactly how / I crawled form the ashes of my past, / I’m ready to talk about it.” This is the beating heart of Ivy Rozen’s book If I Love You, a collection that claws its way to the core of survival. The arc of the speaker’s life unfolds through sections mirroring the stages of fruit: Raw, Ripe, Overripe, Rotten, Replanted. And indeed, Rozen’s poems ask: How can a fruitful life emerge when it begins in the bitter soil of a mother who “believes in aliens” but “doesn’t believe in her daughter”? Where does the future lead when “my girl will eat my heart” and “inherit me, / and my mother, / and her mother”? The search for love—from family, friends, partners—is brutal, and full of betrayal and sorrow. However, like the seeds replanted, the speaker eventually comes to see journey as necessity: “I wish I could have told you then / what I couldn’t have known until now.” For the reader, If I Love You is a bleak mirror and a kind hand, a deep inward journey and a path back to the light.

—Jessica L. Walsh, author of Blowdown and Book of Gods and Grudges

Ivy Rozen’s If I Love You leads us on a startling memoiristic journey through the trials of young womanhood, dropping luminous revelations on us like breadcrumbs through the dark wilderness of experience. Rozen delivers a clever blend of hyperreal imagery, precise rhyme, and offhanded idioms until we, too, shed comfort for love…for safety…for lust…for limerence… for our forever lost innocence. We come to second guess everything about family, trauma, sex, and choices made and unmade–just like Rozen’s speaker who’s possessed of both a prodigious memory and a fallible philosophical unreliability. This is Rozen as a wandering American Alice, wondering if she has “the heart to tell her.” She does. This book does. In poems as bold as brass, Rozen asks: am I home yet?; can “I be the hero” yet?; can recollection bring us through the darkness? This brave and bright book keens with honesty, but ultimately whispers tenderly: “If I love you.”

–L.J. Sysko, author of The Daughter of Man and Battledore. For further info, head to ljsysko.com.