What She Knows by Marcia Roberts

Save Tibet — fluttering prayer papers folded in an envelope

I throw them away

who can save anything?

By assembling these fragments into a whole, the poet Marcia Roberts has saved telling moments from a lifetime’s experience; and having done so with care, now generously shares them.

—Tom Clark

Marcia Roberts’ reflective serial poems pursue the connecting events of one’s life. In What She Knows, images, phrases, and movements of memory emerge in elegantly stated verse and prose that reveal more than personal biography, though the details of individual experience matter significantly. In this writing time and geography are imposed as forces that hone the features of the stories she tells. Gleanings of distant lives and gone worlds merge into more contemporary spaces, careful and curious perspectives moving through memory toward some future realization in the poem. Fragments of landscapes in South Dakota, California, Texas, and Spain arrive through voices, conversations, and the textures of the inanimate found in imagistic relations, like the sound of acorns hitting a roof. A many-textured and layered movement of intelligence in the serial form announces itself as something other to this author, whose own relation to these experiences remain secondary to the narrative revelations of the poem. The organization of the imaginary of one’s life finds great possibility in Roberts’ seriality. While a Midwest deadpan accompanies the sensitive and attentive presence of her new work, there is a sense also in which the story is responsible to larger cultural events. The poems press the human close to the surface of language.

—Dale Smith

“What She Knows is exactly the vitality of these poems, a knowing. And for the first time in ages the poet is squatted down with us watching & listening – not the orator or the professor or the performer – but the witness & the singer & the one that got away, and said some things before she left. Slow forming lines immersing with a sharp visionary speed, and there isn’t a subject or memory that this poet can’t weave. Come inside you lucky fool. Marcia Roberts just makes me happy about poetry to come.”

—Bob Arnold

Imagine a clock on which the hour and minute hands remain still while the slender second hand circles and circles and you can understand something of how time feels in Marcia Roberts’ What She Knows. Constant yet changing, motionless yet fleeting, hers is an attentive accumulation of the details that hover behind the visible world, the voice overheard, the light made slant. “Who can save anything?” she writes. Well, she can. Not by gripping too tightly, but by reflecting what she knows, the way a mind moves across the inner and outer landscapes simultaneously, second by second, flowing and eddying, waiting, watching it all.

—Jenny Browne

In Marcia Roberts’ What She Knows, we witness a poet relentlessly holding on to the quiet recollections of life in an increasingly hostile environment, and in the process, we are presented with a poetics we can learn from.

—Micah Robbins

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Marcia Roberts chapbook Open Eye was published by Skanky Possum Press in 2004.  Effing Press published Autumn’s Slant and In the Bird’s Breath in 2009.  Marcia lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband Len.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 60 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 9781935402305

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