The seeds of Brittany Rogers’s debut poetry collection, Good Dress (Tin House, October 2024), were planted in 2017. At the time, Rogers was working on a manuscript about family, motherhood, and inheritance titled “What Runs in the Blood.” Three years later, however, she felt distant from the poems and decided to start from scratch. Taking just a handful of poems from her initial attempt, Rogers wrote the book that became Good Dress. “The collection shifted from my centering the roles and obligations I held to others, to my centering my relationship to autonomy and audacity,” she says. The resulting poems, which include self-portraits, short narratives, pastorals, odes, aubades, and formal plays on documents, show a clear-eyed speaker refusing external definition. “I belong to me,” writes Rogers in Good Dress. “I…
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Poets & Writers (Digital) - 1 Issue, November/December 2024