Sure Thing by Robin Brox

Like the images in this thoughtful debut, Brox’s poems chart our attraction to surfaces, textures, and weathers with a calm hand intent on recording the “”tenderest ambivalences”” of our desires and senses.

—Jennifer Moxley

There is a kind of abstraction, based not on reductive form, nor on self-expressive mark making but on the endless variation of form, colour and shifting scale in the natural world. In this vigorous, detailed and abstracted poetry the most traditional matter: season, climate, weather, plants, is specified as human bodies move and make their lives in post-industrial landscapes that nature has recolonized. Focused on physical changes in state and their environmental and metabolic outcomes, these serial poems and binary arrays have a fierce grip on the complexity of our experience.

—Tony Lopez

These poems are wordplay, but simultaneously, mature work beyond the “”I”” of youth, poems of body and eye. They are sensual, full of weather, color and texture, images tangible as weather and rope. Brox binds up the known with the unrecognized, makes new things.

—Celia White

“”no ideas/ but in things pulled close . . .”” thus articulates Robin Brox, “”over burdock wildly,”” the poetics of this stunning collection. Playful, “”glass-sharp in the shadows,”” Brox’s devotions transmit affection and repulsion through the surfaces of a place lived raw and tenderly noted. These are vital poems for difficult weather, language roughed and unexpectedly straight to the heart, lit with the uncanny light of attention both heavenly and subterranean, born when we “”love what/ seems barren.”” A brave, exquisite and necessary book.

—Jonathan Skinner

Robin Brox pushes at the “membranes between worlds” in her Sure Thing, worlds cluttered with “experience’s self made / detritus.” Time, though, is Brox’s true world, her muse and her medium. She agitate and plays with it, accelerates, extenuates, and records it “rippling open,” always weaving back to January, always beginning. Sure Thing is unblinkingly situated in a cold climate, one that “attacks but we regenerate.” Robin Brox’s honest and powerful poetry witnesses attack and ensures regeneration.

— Sherry Robbins

Book Information:

· Paperback: 102 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-017-0

$16

Sure Thing by Robin F. Brox… by BlazeVOX [books]