“Where Are the Snows is somehow desperately tender and wickedly incisive at the same time. Kathleen Rooney manages a smart, fierce, and intelligent take on contemporary life that everyone should read. It is a generous book that invites a reader in, and generative in the way that good poetry always is. Read a couple of pages of this book and you need to put it down and go make something, whether a poem or a sculpture or a major life decision, as you prefer. Any of the three would be in the spirit of this wild and wonderful work.”
—Kazim Ali, author of The Voice of Sheila Chandra
“In Kathleen Rooney’s Where Are the Snows, profound and hilarious stanzas underpin a philosophy for living in an era that feels post-claiming-to-be-post-anything. The book is both a modern pastoral with startled, awestruck observations about everything from the economy to Wednesdays and a deeply emotional elegy for a complicated, yet beloved, spirituality. Rooney’s adroit use of language reveals how nostalgia and history are their own kinds of mysticism and—my favorite—that time itself is just a metaphysical joke. I mean, c’mon, her dedication reads: To the future. Rooney is at her funniest in this book, and in all the best ways: subversive, nerdy, and tragic. You won’t believe how saintly I’ve become. She writes. Big halo energy. This is a great book.”
—Sommer Browning, author of Good Actors
“Reading Kathleen Rooney’s Where Are the Snows is refreshing. Here is a book unafraid to face the various crises of the world and admit it might not work out. The magic of Rooney’s writing is its lightness: funny, playful, cynical, indulgently dark, and poignant, Where Are the Snows is always delightful. I promise you won’t be able to stop reading these poems.”
—José Olivarez, Author of Citizen Illegal
“Kathleen Rooney’s Where Are the Snows is a book of investigative improvisation—interested in the loss and whereabouts of everyday goodness, the futility of contemporary politics and capitalism, the transience of joy and sorrow. Her supercharged lyrics pulse with interruption, iteration, and inference. They juxtapose absurd facts and self-deprecating queries with the timing of a standup comedian. Half heartbreaking, half hilarious, this book is 100% punk rock.”
—Marcus Wicker, author of Silencer
"Overall, it may well be magical. Or then again, perhaps this is just a poet who knows what she’s about"
—John Domini in The Brooklyn Rail
"Kathleen Rooney’s collection of 'whatchamacallits' is a true delight to read, funny, expressive, rhythmic, informative, opinionated, erudite and subtle."
—Charles Rammelkamp in The Lake
"Reading Kathleen Rooney's Where Are the Snows is much like walking into an echo chamber from which you emerge enlightened, amused and shaken."
—Max Winter in Star Tribune
"With the mention of 'featureless time,' [Rooney] hints at how the poems that follow will weave back and forth across centuries, calling up images of classical paintings and referencing a timeline of abiding luminaries that includes everyone from Lucretius to The Beatles to Satan himself. As she tours us through the ages, Rooney seems to take on the role of a Dickensian Christmas ghost, pointing a knowing finger at the pains of the past—the greed, the disregard, the inequalities, the plagues—and calling attention to how those issues still remain."
—Carrie Muehle in TriQuarterly
"Written in the midst of the pandemic and Trump, Where Are the Snows is exorcism as lyrical standup."
—Robert Puccinelli in LitHub
"In Where Are the Snows, Kathleen Rooney asks, 'Who will write the moral history of my generation?' While she doesn’t pretend to be that person, she does, in the thirty-nine poems that make up this collection, address the kinds of issues—faith and religion, hope and desolation, societal normalities and abnormalities—that would most certainly be part of such a chronicle."
—Patrick Parks in Southeast Review
"Where Are the Snows is darkly funny and tenderly beautiful and often downright haunting, both a marker of this fraught time in national and world history and a bit of timeless art."
—Caitlin Archer-Helke in Third Coast Review
"Rooney has written an immersive book of poems that observe motherhood, love, capitalism, and more."
—José Olivarez in Chicago Mag
"humorous and playful"
—Rachel Robbins in Rain Taxi
