Description
Poetry. With collages by the author. Doren Robbins' unique voice of existential disgust and cynicism comes through in a relentless damning of our culture, politics and state of being. And yet, it is hilarious, laugh-out-loud funny, the absurdity of the human condition splayed on the pages of TWIN EXTRA for our examination.
"As out there as on an LA freeway. Pushing the mind, the language, the knowable, the absurdities, the 'dipshitalore,' the passions, the maturity of a surrealist—one's self and one's reality. His intellectual, linguistic, vast roaming in these poems will blow you away in recognition, gratitude, and awe…What an accomplishment! What joy!"—Sharon Doubiago
"TWIN EXTRA is a delicatessen Walt Whitman, satirical yet dead-serious and playing for keeps, coming to grips with the infernal system of life in an ironically and grotesquely distorted American hell … Doren Robbins' poems bring to mind the self-revelatory stanzas in Whitman's 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,' but now the river is underground, the ferry has become Rimbaud's Drunken Boat, and the city's an infernal ruins populated with labyrinthine memories of alienated and damaged souls caught in the contradictions generated by dystopian capitalism."—Uri Hertz
Author Bio
Doren Robbins is a poet and mixed media artist from California. After twenty-something years traveling, living eight years in Oregon, raising a family, and working as a cook and as a carpenter, he started teaching a variety of creative writing, literature, and composition classes through an extended personal interpretation of Kenneth Burke's idea of 'literature as equipment for living.' As a poet and an artist he has been active organizing readings and producing posters to benefit The Romero Relief Fund and The Salvadoran Medical Relief Fund during the Salvadoran Civil War and poetsagainstthewar.com during the American-Iraq War. His work has appeared in Third Rail, 5 AM, Sulphur, Iowa Review, Kayak, New Letters, North Dakota Quarterly, American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, and many other periodicals. Recent collections of poetry, Driving Face Down (awarded the Blue Lynx Poetry Award 2001) and My Piece of the Puzzle (awarded the 2008 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award) were published at Lynx House Press and Eastern Washington University Press. Lost Horse Press published Amnesty Muse in 2011. Robbins is also the author of a collection of monologues, short fiction and prose poetry, Parking Lot Mood Swing (Cedar Hill Press 2004). His writing has been awarded fellowships and grants from Oregon Literary Arts, The Loft Foundation, The Chester H. Jones Foundation, The Judah Magnes Museum, The Indiana Review, and a few other readable periodicals and inoffensive organizations. Since 2001, he has taught at Foothill College where he has received the Foothill College Honors Society Appreciation Award for his teaching.
Author City: SANTA CRUZ, CA USA