In this debut collection of poetry and prose, Jaydn DeWald explores the relationships between individuality and community, queerness and the bourgeois nuclear family, genre expectations and a postmodern awareness, even distrust, of literary production. Can the imagination forge intimacy, love? Impact history? Or do imaginers merely exile themselves from the world? In a series of obsessive poetic sequences, the speaker-narrators of The Rosebud Variations variously pit themselves against giants of Western art and the heteronormative desires/values that all too often underpin them.