“There is nothing sentimental in this work...just the unflinching vision of a perceptive eye ... . This is a strong work, one that uses sharp and fresh language to achieve compassion.” --Walter R. Holland in Pleiades, Winter 2014
"'I could,' Joshua Robbins writes, 'I could listen / to the trash can's / tipped-over plea' and filled with the presence and fullness of an unfallen world, one that outlasts all our frail and barely imagined dreams of heaven, 'I could listen' to 'the skewbald // hallelu of a dying lawn, / and praise nothing, / let daybreak's // brokenness catch / like glass shards in my throat / and not swallow.' Robbins's world is ours, excoriating us with its strangeness, its independence, beatifying us when we come to its calls. Here the glass is finely etched, finely broken off the diamond edges of these poems. 'How we burned then' in the light of this world, 'bright / as when we first believed.'" --Jake Adam York, author of Persons Unknown
"The burden of these poems is Faith, once held, now endlessly longed for and endlessly eluding. This is our late American moment, the moment of asphalt and strip malls, of identical subdivisions and office parks, of convenience stores and chain-link fences, junkies and missing girls and bodies coughed up in the shadows of warehouses. 'What consolation is there,' Robbins asks, 'between heaven and earth, / between here and after?' Nothing, it would seem, since 'surely nothing / is coming for to carry us home.' Like Larry Levis, Joshua Robbins stares straight into the sun and doesn't flinch, and yet, like Levis, he manages to find brief moments of beauty in terror and desolation. We are all the better for his hard truths. It's difficult to believe this is a first book, but, remarkably, it is. What a debut!" --Susan Wood, author of The Book of Ten