[In the following review, Almon praises The Halfbreed Chronicles and the "elegance and precision" of Rose's poetry.]

[The Halfbreed Chronicles and Other Poems is a] strong and well-crafted collection of poems on Native American subjects. Rose writes with elegance and precision: her images are brilliant and her lines move with sureness. Rose's use of parallelism links her work to Native American models, while her diction manages to be fresh (because it is vivid) and traditional (because it evokes fundamentals of life and earth in the Indian tradition). She writes protest poems that avoid attitudinizing and easy rhetoric. Most of Rose's work has an objective flavor, but when it takes on a personal tinge, it comes across as genuine and lacking in self-pity even when the material is distressing ("The Building of the Trophy") The last section of the book, "The Halfbreed Chronicles," moves from Native themes to a worldwide perspective: there are compassionate and angry poems about such figures as Truganinny, the last Tasmanian, Yuriko, a Hiroshima victim, Kitty Hart (who survived Auschwitz), and Isamu, a Japanese American sculptor rejected by his Japanese father. These poems are imagined from within: the subjects are not reduced to texts for sermons.