Books

Lines the Quarry

Omnidawn, 2013.

Winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize

Selected by Brenda Hillman

One of the most compelling first books I’ve read in years. If there is a literary equivalent to the financial cliff, Robin Clarke’s Lines the Quarry represents the mountain of wreckage at the bottom of the free fall. Workers Comp injury data, fractured syntax, Robocops, and “stories/of girl children young enough to marry their fathers, old/enough to shoulder the pretend” all mash up into a stunning series of poems. This book is where OSHA meets arsenic, and where the courage to take a political position amidst the sampling of texts is the very beginning of “making it new” all over again.

Mark Nowak, author of Shut Up Shut Down

Lives of the Czars

nonpolygon, 2011.

This limited edition chapbook is a line-for-line collaboration between poet-friends Sten Carlson and Robin Clarke, who tried to imagine what it would be like if intelligent robots decided they needed to write poetry and they had all of human history, or rather, the internet, at their disposal.