Overview

""These poems, in love with language and enthralled by various longings, will bemuse and beguile readers as they register the Peruvian heights and abyssal depths of a life lived without moderation. Mass for Shut-Ins is a lament for wounded love, a celebration of recovery, an elegy for innocence, and an ode to hope."" From the Author

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9781935218487

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The poems in Todd Robinson's Mass for Shut-Ins are simultaneously societal and intensely personal, gleaned through a lens of unifying solitariness, the sense that We, anonymous cannon-fodder share more than we've ever differed, our burden of impermanence both unique and unexceptional. --David Z./I>--David Z. Drees WSC Press

"""The poems in Todd Robinson’s Mass for Shut-Ins are simultaneously societal and intensely personal, gleaned through a lens of unifying solitariness, the sense that ""We, anonymous cannon-fodder"" share more than we've ever differed, our burden of impermanence both unique and unexceptional.""—David Z. Drees, WSC Press “Todd Robinson has written such tender love poems in Mass for Shut-Ins that you might read them to your significant other and hope for success—a veritable Neruda of Nebraska. In ‘Skin,’ the speaker is ‘a soft / ravening / hominid torched / by rosewater/ & coconut oil.’ The poems are no less fervent toward the old sod, beautifully evoking the contemporary Midwest. He feels ‘the jolt of coal trains / through the gut of steaming America.’ A splendid debut.”—Terese Svoboda"

Todd Robinson has written such tender love poems in Mass For Shut-Ins that you might read them to your significant other and hope for success - a veritable Neruda of Nebraska. In 'Skin,' the speaker is 'a soft / ravening / hominid torched / by rosewater/ & coconut oil.' The poems are no less fervent toward the old sod, beautifully evoking the contemporary Midwest. He feels 'the jolt of coal trains / through the gut of steaming America.' A splendid debut. - Therese Svoboda

Such a bounty of intelligence and pleasure packed inside here! These are deeply lovable love songs, odes to friends and lovers, the sound of crickets and grackles, BB guns and boozy evenings on the Plains. To me they manage to be cheerful even when they're heartbreaking. So here's to you, Mr. Robinson. --Kurt Andersen, author of Fantasyland Todd Robinson is a poet doing his best to figure a life; doing it with a fair share of humor, but also seriously, honestly, as though he and the rest of us weren't in the throes of a new century already worn to a nub of real work and sorrow. --David Wyatt, author of Gathering Place

Author Information

Todd Robinson earned a B.A. and M.A. in English from Creighton University, and a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He teaches in the Writer's Workshop and the Thompson Learning Community at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. His work has appeared in The Cortland Review, Canopic Jar, and A Dozen Nothing.

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