Rumor

Robinson’s ambition in Rumor is enormous—to understand the problem of violence, to understand how power subjugates bodies and souls and turns them to use. In the world these poems inhabit, language itself is a violent power tool, a buzzsaw, precise, ruthless, and often wrong. Yet language’s instability allows Robinson to turn it on itself to question categories such as gender. Through brooding, bloody, clearwater analysis, through delicate, brutally uncertain self-questioning, Robinson’s poems c