Jay Rogoff has taught at Skidmore College since 1995; first in the former Liberal Studies Program, and since 2001 in the English Department, where he teaches courses in poetry, poetry writing, nonfiction writing, arts reviewing and criticism, Shakespeare, and twentieth century poetry.
His new poetry collection is Venera. It is Rogoff’s fifth book. In it, a husband consoles his wife when she is wakened by an imaginary child; another man daydreams of his kindergarten crush. Mary at the Annunciation, stunned by Gabriel’s inhuman beauty, contemplates her decades of purity stretching ahead.
Drawing on the natural world, personal intimacy, and the imagination as evoked in visual art and biblical narrative, Rogoff’s poems detail our drive to both acts of veneration and submission to Venus’s sensuous power.