Rumor

Elizabeth Robinson Free Verse Editions Edited by Jon Thompson Information and Pricing 978-1-60235-153-0 ($14, paperback); 978-1-60235-154-7 (PDF, $9.99). © 2018 by Parlor Press, 86 pages. Bookstores: Order by fax, mail, or phone. See our "Sales and Ordering Page" for details. What People Are Saying Robinson's ambition in this short book is enormous—to understand the problem of violence, to understand how power subjugates bodies and souls and turns them to use. In the world these poems inhabit, language itself is a violent power tool, a buzzsaw, precise, ruthless, and often wrong. Yet language's instability allows Robinson to turn it on itself to question categories such as gender. Through brooding, bloody, clearwater analysis, through delicate, brutally uncertain self-questioning, Robinson's poems create a frictive warmth that's not comfortable, but rousing. —Catherine Wagner Elizabeth Robinson has long been probing the interplay of the personal with the abstract or, as she has put