Lousy Explorers [Paperback]

Rosnau's poems are never content with mere fantasies of suburban prettiness. She brings a psychological depth and gravitas reminiscent of William Stafford's or James Dickey's disturbed rural precincts into the residential corridors of southern British Columbia, and that makes me very happy. [Ranked as one of Vermeersch's favourite poetry collections of 2009].
--Paul Vermeersch, author of The Reinvention of the Human Hand and Between the Walls

In language assured and eloquent, Laisha Rosnau offers an edgy, big-hearted plunge into those moments of shift that show us at our most human. And reminds us that how one accommodates oneself to change, how one embraces and lives inside it, is a mark of one's humanity.
--Marnie Parsons, The Globe and Mail

Her keen sense of observation remains undiminished, and its subsequent translation to her verse elicits a wide range of responses from the reader. She writes wryly and with confidence.
--Andrew Vaisius, Prairie Fire

Laisha Rosnau's wonderful second collection Lousy Explorers takes as its epigraph the final stanza of Gwendolyn MacEwen's "Dark Pines Under Water": "But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper/ And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper/In an elementary world;/There is something down there and you want it told." Her poems are about women who are sinking, who have left one place for another, who have embarked upon new journeys and new lives in ways that are subtle or otherwise.
--Kerry Clare, Pickle Me This

As imagery goes, it is difficult to recall someone I have recently encountered as talented as Rosnau ... Every reader will feel an instant kinship with [her] presentation of the ordinary and miraculous, and it is impossible to read one poem without instantly jumping to the next. The straightforward, pure beauty of these poems will resonate with you long after your first (and second, and third) reading.
--Rhiannon Rogstad, The Goose

Rosnau steps out into the unforgiving light of a once-shaded forest and shows us the growing pains of transition through marriage, relocation, motherhood. Exposed, expanding, these are poems on the verge of eruption, as they wait in the aftermath of a pine beetle epidemic, in the lack of a forest that once was.
--Jennifer Still, Winnipeg Free Press

"Rosnau has a talent for building a complete atmosphere in a few simple but sacred-sounding words."
--McGill Tribune

"That's Rosnau's poetry--angry, bittersweet, brimming with sex and the need to be noticed, but not in a cheap and easy way."
--Prairie Fire
(Praise for Rosnau's previous work)