Michael Robbins

About

Alien vs. Predator (Penguin Books, 2012)
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

"Mr. Robbins’s heart is not lovely but beating a bit arrhythmically; not dark but lighted by a dangling disco ball; not deep but as shallow and alert as a tidal buoy facing down a tsunami. Yet it’s a heart crammed full, like a goose’s liver, with pagan grace. This man can write." — Dwight Garner, The New York Times

University of Chicago PhD

@alienvsrobbins
please direct all publicity requests to langan.kingsley@us.penguingroup.com

[Best Books of 2012 lists on which Alien vs. Predator appears]
The New York Times
The New York Times (2)
The Boston Globe
Slate
The New York Observer
The Australian
Commonweal
Complex
Books & Culture
Vol. 1 Brooklyn
Vol. 1 Brooklyn (2)
The Millions

[Recent poems]
The Walrus (forthcoming)
The New Yorker
Poetry
Boston Review
The Awl
La Petite Zine
HTMLGIANT
nonsite
Poetry

[Reviews of Alien vs. Predator]
The New York Times Book Review
The New York Times
The Washington Post
Financial Times
The Boston Globe
Entertainment Weekly
Publishers Weekly
The New York Observer
National Post
The Weekly Standard
Library Journal
The Kansas City Star
The Boston Phoenix

[Recent interviews & profiles]
The Believer
Chicago Tribune
Los Angeles Review of Books
Newcity
Suicide Girls
The New York Observer
The Paris Review
Vol. 1 Brooklyn
The Best American Poetry
Bomblog

[Recent reviews & such]
(I also write regularly for the Chicago Tribune's Printers Row, too often to link to here)
on Pistol Annies [SPIN]
on Susan Wheeler [Books & Culture]
on Anne Carson [The New York Observer]
on My Bloody Valentine [SPIN]
on Swinburne [Poetry]
on Dylan Thomas [Poetry]
on Louise Glück [The Los Angeles Review of Books]
on Taylor Swift [SPIN]
on genre fiction [Chicago Tribune]
on Neil Young [The New York Observer]
on pop music and poetry [Chicago Tribune]
on Frederick Seidel [Chicago Tribune]
on Maureen N. McLane [The New York Observer]
on Marilynne Robinson [The New York Observer]
on Perdita [Poetry]
on Geoffrey Hill, Ish Klein, & Fanny Howe [Poetry]
on Fucked Up [The Daily]
on Wild Flag [The Daily]
on David Orr [The New York Observer]
various reviews in Poetry magazine
on John Ashbery [London Review of Books]
on Nick Lowe [Village Voice]
on Bruce Springsteen [Village Voice]
on the Gaslight Anthem [Village Voice]

"Embrace Michael Robbins as a damned funny poet, but appreciate that he's a damned good craftsman too. Melded to the punch line is the prosody—a trochee here, a Dickinsonian stanza there, a brush stroke that conjures Mayakovsky, a pie in the face to Basho. The easiest way to say it is this: prepare to be impressed."—Lisa Jarnot

"These poems are bad for you, the way alcohol, cigarettes, coffee, bacon, carbohydrates, television and the internet are bad for you. Better pick up extra copies for your villa, your chalet, your hutment, your yurt, and your sidewalk grate."—Jordan Davis

Like What You See?

Friday, March 30, 2012

A really amazing review of my book in The National Post by Michael Lista. Just, I mean, wow. Thanks.

If later John Ashbery and David McGimpsey have proven that capitalist popular culture is a suitable subject for poetry, Robbins goes a step further and attempts its formal mimesis. And he does it really goddamn well…. What makes Alien vs. Predator such a brilliant and important book is that he makes us realize the voice of the contemporary muse is the same as the scopophrenic inner voice of the good consumer, screaming “buy buy buy” at everything we see. In Robbins’ poetry, the software of the free market, where everything is for sale, is run on the horrifically decadent hardware of Western thinking, where everything is in its right place.

Notes

rayven23 likes this
dropouthangoutspaceout reblogged this from towerofsleep and added:

I would really like to read this.
towerofsleep reblogged this from michaelrobbinspoet and added:

Just waiting for it to show up in the mail.
michaelrobbinspoet posted this

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