I wrote "At the Whitney" because I was literally stunned by The Rose and equally stunned to learn it is usually encased in storage boxes in the basement - rarely on view. DeFeo died from lead poisoning as a result of the many years she spent making and remaking The Rose.
Deborah Bogen's full-length collection, Landscape With Silos, won the 2005 X J Kennedy Poetry Prize; her chapbook, Living by the Children's Cemetery won the 2002 ByLine Press competition. Bogen's poems and reviews appear widely, recently in the Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review and Shenandoah. Visit her online at www.DeborahBogen.net for future readings and more work.