The Second Sex
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A second collection from a poet of “sheer joy and dizzy command” (The New York Times)
Upon its publication in 2012, Alien vs. Predator, the debut collection by Michael Robbins, became one of the hottest and most celebrated works of poetry in the country, winning acclaim for its startling freshness and originality, and leading critics to say that it was the most likely book in years to open up poetry to a new readership.
Robbins’s poems are strange, wonderful, wild, and irrationally exuberant, mashing up high and low culture with “a sky-blue originality of utterance” (The New York Times). The thirty-six new poems in The Second Sex carry over the music, attitude, hilarity, and vulgarity of Alien vs. Predator, while also working deeper autobiographical and political veins.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Robbins made waves with his 2012 debut, Alien vs. Predator, whose pages relished shock value, pop culture, disorientation, non sequiturs, and rock'n'roll almost as much as they relished rhyme. This thinner follow up almost all in rhyme, most of it in short-lined quatrains keeps the jangling sound, but ups the name-dropping and shock value per page: "If it's romance you're after in Phoenix,/ just ask a teen girl for a Kleenex." An abundance of names worthy of VH1 Classic invade and transform the literary classics throughout Robbins's peppy, irritable set from the sub-Rilkean adjuration "You must improve your archaic bust" to sub-Blakean "dark/ Satanic Hayley Mills." He depicts himself, "alone with my cat," as a would-be star, a reluctant indie intellectual, and a sadly typical, frustrated American straight guy: "I make the beast with no backs." If his first book landed somewhere between the speedy cultural kaleidoscope of, say, Dean Young and the kitschy provocations of Frederick Seidel, these un-PC, often sarcastic, fast-moving lines find him closer to the latter. Robbins is also a talented, prolific critic, and his fans may anticipate the synergy, or just line up for more of his verse, though some might be afraid to find more of the same.
