Kirjahaku

The poems in Michael Robins's fourth collection grapple with the cadences of language and the implacable push of time. At the threshold where domestic and natural landscapes meet, People You May Know forges its own path between the ebb and flow-the flood and flicker-of loss and lamentation. But the clear-eyed dawn is rarely far away in these stanzas, which rise from calamity and failure in order to discover comfort and a capacity for renewal. Here, every absence creates a space for the shared experience known among friends, strangers, those wondrous lives that precede and illuminate our own.

The Bright Invisible, the fifth collection from Michael Robins, investigates domesticity and desire, reenactment and reclamation, as well as the promise of love alongside the certainty of absence. "Sometimes the sun," Robins writes, "elbows the ordinary, archival cloud" and sometimes we "close our eyes / & describe for each other what colors appear." These poems are imbued with the "soft collisions" of our dazzling existence, and they offer the possibility for even the darkest season to guide us once more into spring.