Penguin Poets
3 total works
Since his poems first began to appear in the pages of The New Yorker and Poetry, there has been a lot of excited talk about the fresh and inventive work of Michael Robbins. Equal parts hip- hop, John Berryman, and capitalism seeking death and not finding it, Robbins's poems are strange, wonderful, wild, and completely unlike anything else being written today. As allusive as the Cantos, as aggressive as a circular saw, this debut collection will offend none but the virtuous, and is certain to receive an enormous amount of attention.
Upon its publication in 2012, Alien vs. Predator, the debut collection by Michael Robbins, became one of the hottest and most celebrated works of poetry in the country, winning acclaim for its startling freshness and originality, and leading critics to say that it was the most likely book in years to open up poetry to a new readership.
Robbins’s poems are strange, wonderful, wild, and irrationally exuberant, mashing up high and low culture with “a sky-blue originality of utterance” (The New York Times). The thirty-six new poems in The Second Sex carry over the music, attitude, hilarity, and vulgarity of Alien vs. Predator, while also working deeper autobiographical and political veins.
Michael Robbins's first two books of poetry were raucous protests lodged from the frontage roads and big-box stores of off-ramp America. With Walkman, he turns a corner. These new poems confront self-pity and nostalgia in witty-miserable defiance of our political and ecological moment. It's the end of the world, and Robbins has listened to all the tapes in his backpack. So he's making music from whatever junk he finds lying around.