Fat & Fire by Roseanna Alice Boswell
Published May 2025
PDF Micro-chapbook

In Fat & Fire, Boswell demands our attention toward an unexpected muse—the DreamWorks movie Shrek—and dazzles us through the voice of an oft-overlooked character—Dragon. Though voiceless in the film, Boswell hears Dragon incisively and moves beyond the universe of the film to pierce into larger questions around the politics of the screen, the body, and domestic life in our contemporary world. These poems “Recognize the glimmer/of bodies trying to say more/than the lines they’re given” and do the necessary work of making the page the space where the silenced body can say what must be said, in language that at once delights and haunts. In every way, Boswell reminds us of the stakes and opportunities of poetic intervention in the archive and the power of the persona poem.

-Stephanie Choi, author of The Longest Neoi

Fans of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red will delight in this monstrously winning love story that imagines a Happily Ever After for Shrek’s Dragon and Donkey. At turns coy, voracious, and deadpan, the voice of the previously voiceless Dragon will charm you with main character energy. But for all her skill at cartoonish comedy, Roseanna Alice Boswell is ultimately more interested in “the underside of slapstick: / that soft rise back up from the ground.” Sensual and funny, these poems take seriously the threat of annihilation that love always risks—“One swallow / could devour me, end me”—and take pleasure in bodies big and small, covered with velvety fur or glittery scales. This is a love story too weird and wonderful for Hollywood.

- Becca Klaver, author of Ready for the World

Roseanna Alice Boswell (she/they) is a poet and public librarian—sometimes in that order. Originally from upstate New York, she currently haunts the Oklahoma prairies with her husband and their three cats. Roseanna is the author of two poetry collections, In the House | In the Woods (Cooper Dillon Books, 2024) and Hiding in a Thimble (Haverthorn Press, 2021), and the chapbook Imitating Light (Iron Horse Literary Review, 2021). Roseanna is currently working toward her PhD in English - Creative Writing. She spends a lot of time thinking about Dragon from Shrek. Fat & Fire is her first micro chapbook publication.