Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. AT FIRST & THEN is radical, beautiful, propulsive. An Orphic tale of a body descending then rising again, the debut chapbook from poet Danielle Rose charts woven stories of addiction, grief, trauma, and, ultimately, gender --the essential pieces of personhood. Through struggle and loss, the poems in AT FIRST & THEN proceed like timid ghosts learning how to form language, gathering the disparate elements of selfhood into a warm coherency, a radical self-permission.