Description
FREAKED by Liz Robbins is one of the winners of the 14th Annual Elixir Press Poetry Awards. Contest judge, Bruce Bond, had this to say about it: "Where there are freaks, there are those who freak. It is the signature of a contemporary world, its fractured inheritance of values and myths, where freak becomes a verb and thus weds the anomaly to her distrust of others and, worse, of self. Chance too can feel like fate, the scattered stars as the authors of character, angelic orders that give us orders, but what we find in this book's opening sequence, "Star-Holder," is, like stars, both held and full of fire. Bitterness, dread, drunkenness and disappointment-they find acceptance in imagination's constellations, in the poem's yearning for connection and yet, as freaked, for an independent refuge. Thus we find the poem as conversation, as something that reaches out, acknowledges, challenges, recalls, however pitched at the speed of individual reverie. Where better to begin a book than with a thrill ride, and the age when it dawns on us that fear and desire are like that couple you knew in high school, at odds constantly, but fabled, fabulous, crazy in love."
Author Bio
Liz Robbins' FREAKED is one of the winners of the 14th Annual Elixir Press Poetry Awards and her second collection, PLAY BUTTON, won the 2010 Cider Press Review Book Award, judged by Patricia Smith. Her album Picked Strings is a recording of various poems from that collection. Her chapbook Girls Turned Like Dials won the 2012 Yellow Jacket Press prize. She won the 2015 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry, and her poems are in recent or forthcoming issues of American Literary Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review Online, and River Styx. She's an associate professor of creative writing at Flagler College in St. Augustine, FL.
Author City: ST AUGUSTINE, FL USA