• Winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize (2003) judged by Ellen Bryant Voigt (Northeastern University Press)

• Winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award (2005)

“Most of what these poems record is dilemma: intractable, mistakenly-wished-for, overwhelming, unsolaced by the old Romantic verities extracted from nature or self-awareness. … Pricked and pulled by doubt, envy, tenderness, self-critique, grief, and domestic claustrophobia, Roeser’s protagonist, like the sly poet herself, seems to defeat convention by earnest failure at it. Yet these accessible, energetic poems are full of quiet insight, usually presented as minor capitulation, major consequences left understated…. What reaches the reader’s heart—through the ear, as Frost said it would—is tone: varied, candid, pitch-perfect, inscribed by syntax and lineation. In [Roeser’s] rich, undeceived catalogs of the world, we hear ‘one soul … taken by surprise.’ … Its sounds are indelible, and without precedent.”
– From the introduction by Ellen Bryant Voigt