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“Robinson’s second collection of poetry for experimental powerhouse Fence Books is a series of lyric meditations on the relation of the self to others. The book’s central figures—some of whom speak, while others are spoken about—all nurse deep wounds, emotional, physical, or spiritual. From the wayward children at the start of the collection to the lovelorn adults who appear towards the end, all of Robinson’s voices speak with the same melancholic consciousness of language. ‘I have tattooed to myself the synonyms for ‘alone’,’ says a twin who seems to have devoured his other in the womb. ‘I find myself floating face-down in the sea, and am grateful that my hands have been bound behind my back so as not to obstruct my view,’ says a nameless child in another poem. Brutality, ever present here, has a kind of beauty in Robinson’s eyes. Punishment is inflicted and received with cool detachment. The narratives hinted at in these prose poem sequences and discreet lyrics are constantly just out of reach. At the center of the book, the poems turn explicitly dreamy: ‘During the drive home, in the dark, she sits in the back seat sullenly and eats the webbing out from between her fingers and toes.’ But no matter what savagery befalls these characters—hauntings, traumas, physical wounds—one speaker says it best: ‘Only the pain is real.’”—Publisher's Weekly
This collection of poems by Elizabeth Robinson circles around and around the place of the individual in relation to an other or Other or others. If human experience is nested in relation, "the braid of bodies that engendered this self," it is also disrupted by "an intimacy that can disassemble and recreate itself" until an uneasy form of empathy emerges from the radical isolation of human introspection.
Using prose poems to suggest the narrative logic of the story, The Orphan & Its Relations takes references from domestic life, myth and folktales, and artworks "to bridge," as Robert Creeley said elsewhere of Robinson's work, "between the physically given world and that other we gloss with words, yet apprehend insistently as the defining presence of our lives themselves."
Endorsements:
“The Orphan is made who she is by loss. The source of her, who gave her birth, has died, and she (like he, like everything that ever lived or breathed or tried to speak) lives to try to find, bring back, replace or reinvent, then simply say the name of the beloved parent dead. This book knows this is the state of us, and that we can, sometimes, make beauty, even meaning out of grief.”—Rebecca Brown
From the Book:
Critique of the Orphan
It's not that presence is glib, but colloquial. Hear the child call,
"Look at me, Mom!"
The words reverberate across the blank playground.
The kid jumps off the swing and picks up the absence which she
then polishes on her shirt and puts in her mouth.
Whoever would have been there to say Don't put that in your mouth
is already in her mouth.
Plaintive: look, look.
"Look at me," says the mother who does not exist and sits like a
wad of gum in the cheek of the child.
The girl has flossy, uncombed hair. She gulps, and the gap in her
throat distends for good.
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ELIZABETH ROBINSON is the author of several books of poetry, including Apprehend, the 2003 winner of the Fence Modern Poets Prize. She was educated at Bard College, Brown University, and Pacific School of Religion. Robinson has been a winner of the National Poetry Series and is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, 2008 Grants to Artists Award. She lives in Boulder, Colorado and teaches at Naropa University.
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