Robyn Schiff

A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize A new book from a poet whose work is wild with imagination, unafraid, ambitious, inventive (Jorie Graham) Located in a menacing, gothic landscape, the poems that comprise A Woman of Property draw formal and imaginative boundaries against boundless mortal threat, but as all borders are vulnerable, this ominous collection ultimately stages an urgent and deeply imperiled boundary dispute where haunting, illusion, the presence of the past, and disembodied voices only further unsettle questions of material and spiritual possession. This is a theatrical book of dilapidated houses and overgrown gardens, of passageways and thresholds, edges, prosceniums, unearthings, and root systems. The unstable property lines here rove from heaven to hell, troubling proportion and upsetting propriety in the name of unfathomable propagation. Are all the gates in this book folly? Are the walls too easily scaled to hold anything back or impose self-confinement? What won't a poem do to get to the other side?

A Woman of Property

An Epic

Information Desk

New York Times Book Review Edtitors' Choice “Among the year's highlights . . . groundbreaking, epic . . . Like visitors exiting the Met’s galleries, readers will emerge from Information Desk bedazzled by the transformative horizons of art.” —Washington Post “An effluvial rush of memory, desire, data, and metaphor . . . It’s bracing to encounter a mind so voracious, so unapologetic in its intelligence.” —New York Review of Books A book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from a writer whose work offers “something few poets ever discover: a vision of the whole world” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker) Robyn Schiff’s fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s information desk, where Schiff long ago held a staff position. Elaborately mapping an interconnected route in and out of the museum through history, material, and memory, Information Desk: An Epic takes us on an anguished soul-quest and ecstatic intellectual query to confront the violent forces that inform the museum’s encyclopedic collection and the spiritual powers of art. Novelistic in its sweep, frantically informative, and deeply intimate in its private recollections, Information Desk: An Epic wayfares with riveting lyric intensity through an epic array of topics and concerns, including illusion, deception, self-deception, complicity, lecherous coworkers, the composition of pigment, the scattering of seeds, ideas, and capital, and insect infestations spreading within artwork. Along the way, Schiff pauses to invoke three terrifying muses—parasitic wasps—in desperate awe of their powers of precision and generative energy. Information Desk: An Epic undertakes a hemorrhaging ekphrastic journey through artifice and the natural world.

As restless, reckless, and precise as the Colt revolver for which it is named, Robyn Schiff’s Revolver “repeats fire without reloading” as it reckons with the array of foreboding objects displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the traces of their ghosts one hundred years later. A dirge on the Singer Sewing Machine, an exuberant and unnerving rumination on multipurpose campaign furniture, and a breathless account of Ralph Lauren’s silver Porsche 550 Spyder are among the collection’s exhilarating corporate histories, urgent fantasias, and agonizing love poems. The long, lavish, and utterly unpredictable sentences that Schiff has assembled contort as much to discover what can’t be contained as what can. This is a book of extremes relentlessly contemporary in scope. And like the eighty-blade sportsman’s knife also described here, Revolver keeps opening and reopening to the daunting possibilities of transformation—“Splayed it is a bouquet of all the ways a point mutates.” from “Silverware by J. A. Henckels” Let me be as streamlined as my knife when I say this. As cold as my three-pronged fork that cools the meat even as it steadies it. A pettiness in me was honed in this cutlers’ town, later bombed, in which Adolf Eichmann, who was born there alongside my wedding pattern, could hear the constant sharpening of knives like some children hear the corn in their hometowns talking to them through the wind. The horizon is just the score they breathe through like a box of chickens breathing through a slit.

Robyn Schiff

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