Robert Wood Lynn

How to Maintain Eye Contact takes readers through a journey of uncertainty and what we make of it. 

Set in three sections, Robert Wood Lynn explores interior uncertainty, interpersonal uncertainty and uncertainty at a larger scale. These narrative poems, influenced by storytelling traditions, find themselves at the nexus of the intimate and the humorous, as well as the absurd and the tragic. These poems examine isolation and grief in their many forms―through heartbreak or the death of loved ones, or show us the world looking back at itself after it ends.

How to Maintain Eye Contact

Mothman Apologia

Shutta Crum

Megan Merchant

Emily Hall

Kimberly Ann Priest

Tamara J. Madison

Caroline Mar

West Trade Review is published quarterly (one print edition each spring and an online quarterly each summer, fall, and winter). We strive to put forth the best contemporary poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction (personal essays/memoir), photography, and artwork and publish a mix of established and up and coming writers/artists.Our mission is to perpetuate the work of artists both well known and yet-to-be-known, simultaneously enriching our world through the written word and visual arts. We strive to reflect diversity in style, content and perspective throughout prose, poetry, photography and other artwork. Our goal is to simply present to you the best art possible by both emerging and established creative minds.

Volume 14, Spring 2023

West Trade Review

This volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets explores love, grief, the opioid epidemic, and coming of age "Elegiac and witty."--Elisa Gabbert, New York Times, "The Best Poetry of 2022" "These poems name the hurt wrought upon the meek that makes the elegy, here, as much an exaltation of the living as a mournful dirge for the land."--Major Jackson, Vanderbilt University The 116th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Robert Wood Lynn's collection of poems explores the tensions of youth and the saturation points of knowledge: those moments when the acquisition of understanding overlaps with regret and becomes a desire to know less. Comprising poems of place set across the Virginias, this collection includes an episodic elegy exploring the opioid crisis in the Shenandoah Valley as well as a separate series of persona poems reimagining the Mothman (West Virginia's famed cryptid) reluctantly coming of age in that state's mountains and struggling with the utility of warnings. These are narrative poems of love and grief, built from a storytelling tradition. Taken together they form an arc encompassing the experience of growing up, looking away, and looking back.

The 116th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, exploring love, grief, the opioid epidemic, and coming of age.

Robert Wood Lynn

About

Books

Join the club