6-Week Generative Workshop: Writing Poetry Inspired by Film

"In turn around BRXGHT XYXS, Rosebud Ben-Oni opens by summoning Matarose—her alter-ego “muse on roller skates”—a wildly original voice that channels K-pop, hip hop, and the intersectional mestiza soul of the entire borough of Queens to create a sound-driven howling lyric paean—an ecstatic queer broken love-song that’s equal parts Bonnie Tyler and bible, Prince and prayer, and 100% pure desire. Ben-Oni’s poems conjure fierce feminist magic to create a simultaneous ode and lament of a book that reminds us we are the sum of all the parts of our selves: our roots and contradictory loves, all the things we’re born into and out of, the corporeal experiences we only sometimes choose—and she brings it all home with power, humor, grace, and lines like this: “This is my blood and this / my body this time / you won’t betray me / I am your kingdom come.”"

"Mercy, these poems will reawaken a wilderness you swore you’d lost the map to. Ben-Oni is doing sacred work here, strutting across the asperous terrain of our modern world with a queer femme sovereignty that intoxicates and heals; at the center of each poem, a fragrant mosh pit. These are the ruthless texts we bitches deserve—poems that drive their readers into feral ascension—until the claws can’t be pulled back in."

"Rosebud Ben-Oni is her own genre.”

"When I started Rosebud’s workshop, I was looking to nurture a flare for creative writing that was in serious danger of dying out. Luckily, she was the perfect teacher to stoke that fire. Beyond putting together a syllabus that stretched our concepts of what poetry could be, she encouraged me and my peers to dip into the strange and the silly as we interpreted the prompts we were given. Her celebration of our growth and her thoughtful questions also gave me a model for feedback that I continue to employ when working through new writing with friends. I recommend to just about everyone I know that they try taking a workshop with Rosebud: she's a poet's poet, a teacher's teacher, and a champion for the kind of exploration, creativity, and fun that I needed to fall in love with writing again."

"Poetry workshop with Rosebud was a wonderfully exciting and supportive space where I felt safe enough to experiment and take risks with my poems. Her writing prompts provoked me to ask deeper questions of myself and the class helped me grow immensely, both as a reader and a poet. The syllabus was rich in poetry, essays, music, and videos that encouraged lively classroom discussion and powerful, engaged writing. What strikes me most about Rosebud is her big-hearted generosity and genuine interest and delight in having her students succeed."

"Rosebud is by far one of the best mentors I’ve had in a workshop setting. Her materials are thought-provoking and inspirational, and they challenge students to explore, play, and experiment. Her comments are always insightful and she creates a supportive environment where students are encouraged to be themselves, as well as to interact with each other both within and beyond the workshop. She’s generous in her feedback and with the time she dedicates to each student and is always willing to answer questions and help in any way she can."

“Rosebud Ben-Oni's poetry is exquisite and astounding. This is a poet who is going places.”

"I experience much boredom these days with the world and its predictable cruelties or poetry and its predictable safeties. This phenomenon of a book launches me with its wonder into space and the multiverse and then somehow discovers compassion where we might expect to find only absence of heat or light. Ben-Oni rides with and wrestles the horse of theory to the event horizon's brink, and at the point that empirical proof can take her no further, love transmutes undoing into possibility unimagined."

“Through these breathtakingly elegant poems, Rosebud Ben-Oni proves once and for all that poetry and science are sisters. If This Is the Age We End Discovery maps, like a series of carefully wrought equations, the physics of connection and loss. What does a love song echo against when it spins into space? What symmetries and risks are woven into our very code? How do we live wired for uncertainty, in the yawn of a universe we can’t control? Readers will find it impossible to escape this collection’s unparalleled gravitational pull.”