poetry, etc.
L.J. Sysko
author of The Daughter of Man and Battledore
Ivy Rozen's If I Love You leads us on a startling memoiristic journey through the trials of young womanhood, dropping luminous revelations on us like breadcrumbs through the dark wilderness of experience. Rozen delivers a clever blend of hyperreal imagery, precise rhyme, and offhanded idioms until we, too, shed comfort for love…for safety…for lust…for limerence… for our forever lost innocence. This brave and bright book keens with honesty, but ultimately whispers tenderly: "If I love you."
Dustin Brookshire
author of For All Of Us Faggots and Contoured
"I want the maggots that eat us / to be fat and healthy, / full of me, and full of you,” writes Ivy Rozen in her collection If I Love You. These lines serve as a testament to a fearless poet exploring trauma, love, heartbreak, and, most of all, survival. If I Love You is a debut rooted in witness—one unafraid to look directly at pain while still searching for tenderness amid its wreckage.
Hillary Gonzalez
author of Seasons, Wild, Unfelt World and Where the Osprey Nest
In a voice that cuts deep and doesn’t hold back, Ivy Rozen’s new collection of poems will find their way under your skin and embed themselves there. They encompass reckoning with betrayal and family trauma—wounds so many of us know only all too well. The poems of If I Love You scream and rage from their pages.
Quinn Carver Johnson
author of The Perfect Bastard
These are poems of connection in all its forms. These are poems of love--fulfilled, unrequited, painful, peaceful, lost, found, & otherwise. If you've been broken open, keep reading. If you're looking to be broken open, keep reading. Ivy Rozen's poems will crack you open & build you back again, but you might not recognize the person you find when you finally close the back cover.
john compton
author of house as a cemetery and my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store
If I Love You is a riveting, emotionally charged book with an array of images that bound together and create a magnificent flow of poems. you'll be captivated with this book.
Jessica L. Walsh
author of Blowdown and Book
of Gods and Grudges
"If you really want to know exactly how / I crawled from the ashes of my past, / I'm ready to talk about it." This is the beating heart of Ivy Rozen's book If I Love You, a collection that claws its way to the core of survival. For the reader, If I Love You is a bleak mirror and a kind hand, a deep inward journey and a path back to the light.
Dylan Krieger
author of Predators Welcome
and No One Is Daddy
Reading If I Love You is like opening a family photo album and finding a stash of laundered money. If you're looking to relish the process of rotting, to spy on family secrets from the nearest treehouse, to watch the life force hide in plain speech, this book is for you.
If I Love You
summer tour dates
Ivy Rozen is an Asheville-based poet and free-expression advocate whose work has been published in Fine Art Globe, Chatham Life & Style Magazine, Education NC, Hot Pot Magazine, Penmen Review, Auvert Magazine, Loblolly Press, and Bottlecap Press. Previously the senior editor of Black Mountain Press, Ivy was selected to judge the Elon University Historic Neighborhood’s annual Primavera Poetry Contest for 2026, and recently founded the Midnight Draft Poetry Collective which provides free resources to poets of all backgrounds.
