Book Review

What this book cares about most:

• Lost cities; places that change each time we try to return. Vibrant spaces haunted by stark realities—for instance, Charlottesville’s recent white supremecist rallies, Monticello’s past life as a plantation, or the South’s history of forced sterilization of women of color.
• The nursing homes where we leave our mothers, the cemeteries where we leave our uncles, the therapists’ offices where we ought to leave our husbands.
• Tourist traps, all-white office spaces, secret drawers, Zoom meetings, “that overgrown lot I’m passing, totally random // and filled with something purple.”
• The liminal and the subliminal.

Poems that moved me:

• “First Walk of the New Year”
• “Woke”
• “Lt. Uhura, Communications Officer, Star Trek”
• “The Residency”

Lines that lingered:

• “Still holding on to that jar of old keys for no reason—”
• “the universe blinks / and everything there is to know yawns into you / and you into it”
• “yearn like a woman / trying to build something holy in her spare time”
• “I’m the person who sees the happy baby and aches / to climb into the mother’s lap”

Figurative language and formal feats:

• At the center of Lost Cities lives a five-part (actually, five-episode) persona poem in the voice of Star Trek character Lt. Nyota Uhura, whom Robin describes as “one of the first black characters to be portrayed in a non-menial role on an American television series.” Robin gives her Uhura depth and humor, often in the same breath, as in: “How many ways can I translate / this emptiness, this distance between things? / And could this uniform be any tighter?”

This book is in conversation with:

• Patricia Smith’s persona poems and Motown-infused lyrics
• Natasha Tretheway’s explorations of anti-miscegenation laws and eugenics
• Earth, Wind & Fire; Stevie Wonder; and the Isley Brothers

Questions this book made me ask:

• What are my own lost cities? Where do I keep attempting to return?
• Robin identifies as “an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes poetry and painting,” and her poems teem with references to music, films, and art. How do these media inform one another in her mind? How interdisciplinary are her dreams?

Who I would give this book to:

• Fans of the poets whom Robin pays homage to across this collection: Eavan Boland, Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lord, Pablo Neruda
• Readers who enjoy the complexities of place—how cities hold many truths at once within various strata of the past