Robinson, Elizabeth: Excursive

Roof Books, paperback

Publication Date: April 1, 2023

Publisher Marketing: New Poetry Collection from the National Poetry Series Winner Elizabeth Robin.

National Poetry Series Winner Elizabeth Robinson is the author of several collections of poetry. Her new book, EXCURSIVE, roves through a miscellany of experience and observation, responding to everything from gerrymandering to Krakatoa to beauty. Robinson offers lyric responses and disruptions in a collection of poetry that observes and interrogates the world in poems that are by turns curious, indignant, irreverent, and tender.

"Alphabet book, subject primer, metaphysical tinderbox--Elizabeth Robinson's Excursive is a protean engagement with worldly categories and interior placements. Finely contemplative but strongly embodied, the poems link among themselves, join one another's tones, and develop coordinates for those spaces where 'arrival is planted within another arrival.' It is left to the reader to chart the dimensions of Robinson's itinerary, and to marvel at her convergent findings, her questing spirit, and her multiform consciousness."--George Albon, author of Brief Capital of Disturbances

"Reminiscent of Shonagon's The Pillow Book, these poems do anything but rest their heads to sleep. Similar to Zuihitsu or 'running brush' style - a running list of thoughts on things, the brush here runs, but also sings, pauses, takes the time to 'change its lyric to the rhythm of our grievances, ' to pre-verbally bite into things in order to 'invoke speech of a different order.' Robinson's collection Excursive catalogues her ponderings with precision. They run the gamut of observation on topics from cups to Krakatoa. A thoroughly thought-provoking read."-- James Thomas Stevens, author of The Golden Book

Poetry.