Nadia Adina Rose's poems and objects hint that the true story must be sought amidst the words and images on the wall, perhaps even beyond them. These are not read literally, as domestic or mundane objects, but rather as metaphors whose meaning is concealed in the titles of the works. The latter directly correspond with Rose's poems to spawn a whole poetic space of open questions and feelings, which introduce tension and at the same time expand the imagination regarding both the explicit and the implicit.
"The most conspicuous thing about Nadia Adina Rose's first book of poems is the absence," wrote Dror Burstein. The lack which Burstein indicates is the clear absence of the human figure. In the objects, as in the poems—the figures occupy the background as a motivating, metaphoric factor. The blanket comprising the object Father, for example, recalls an angel's unfurling wings which enable its flight, while the textile cascade, made of a white sheet, hangs down to the floor, as if it were connecting heaven and earth. In Sentence, the sewn tree branches embroider a cipher of sorts, like hieroglyphics of remnants extracted from an archaic nature, possibly a part of some mysterious ritual.
Like the wall pieces, which are made of soft materials, the poems convey life stories by means of only a few characters. The symbolic value of the past accumulated in the material is altered to recount stories about the human family, society and its wounds. Private wounds are laid bare through personal objects, those found in anyone's possession; under Rose's hands, however, they undergo a process of design, and are transformed into essentially universal emotional landscapes: loves, interpersonal relations, and changes brought about by historical events.
The bare white wall revealed between the works assumes a special meaning, like the void created between words and lines in texts of poetry or prose. In Rose's works, the void is recharged with meaning which enhances the concrete piece. The words, like the signs taking shape, are forms that crystallize thought and give it expression, at times lucid, at others enigmatic. The enigmatic quality is highly significant since it allows each reader/viewer to dwell in individual contemplation. As Rose writes in her poem Siesta: "The pleats of my thoughts alone / surrender my being."