The Aesthetic Astronaut

Congratulations to former Back Stage colleague Roger Armbrust on these great reviews for his new volume of poems, The Aesthetic Astronaut.

Roger Armbrust’s contemporary sonnets plunge right to the core of both the matter and the reader. Through sound, vision and a plainspoken voice, these accessible sonnets create an immediate resonance within, bringing this poetic form to the everyday reader and begging each one to be read over and over again.
--Raymond Hammond, editor, The New York Quarterly

Roger Armbrust packs a tremendous amount of movement into 14 lines. This bobbing, weaving, trembling, shaking collection is long overdue!
--Amy Fusselman, author of 8 and The Pharmacist’s Mate

I have known and admired Roger Armbrust’s poems for many years. But when Roger met the sonnet… he quickly turned the window-like form into a window on a world – his. And what a rich, varied world it is. In the sonnet “Spring 2007 Evocations,” he writes about his daughter’s art. With a few substitutions in pronouns it might read: “… I marvel how he’s trusted/his heart, his growing skills of artistic eye/and graceful hand, transforming emotions/and intelligence into sonnets.” This is not to suggest all of the poems are delicate – they often display muscular rhythms and playful rimes – but he knows when they need to be just that.
-- H. A. Maxson, poet, author of On the Sonnets of Robert Frost: A Critical Examination of the 37 poems