Poetry. With lushness and a perplexity reminiscent of Wallace Stevens, the poems of Michael Robins' second collection blend allusion—from late-20th century rock lyrics to the Gettysburg Address—and negotiate feeling amid a troubled history of the United States. These persistent, cunning voices claim prey and hunter alike: whether a tortured prisoner or the nation's first colonists who might coexist among the indigenous populations if their "arms could hold steady," but instead take aim by spreading disease to "the kind people of the new country." LADIES & GENTLEMEN is an invitation to the spectacle—and spectral—of American life, where the plugs of ordinary billboards are as probable as the horrors suffered when any people are under siege. John Yau writes, "With the precision of a diamond cutter, Michael Robins taps into the harsh murmurs of the daily world."

Author City: CHICAGO, IL USA

Michael Robins is the author of The Next Settlement (University of North Texas Press, 2007), which received the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, and the chapbook Circus (Flying Guillotine Press, 2009).