Double Helix by Robin Dellabough

Robin Dellabough‘s poems in Double Helix are exacting and unsentimental. They’re interested in looking at life head on.

–Alex Dimitrov, author of Love and Other Poems, Together and By Ourselves, and Begging for It

Robin Dellabough’s Double Helix traces a new chiromancy through retrospection, interpreting the intersecting lines of personal histories as they reveal themselves in memory and artifact. This collection of poems, a braid of meditations on divorce, addiction, and heredity, attends to the refractions of the past with care and acuity. These poems observe the long shadow of inherited lessons—“I’ve taught her Prokofiev, / osmosis, the Dow, to laugh at my dark funny stories”—even as they mark the lacunae, the mysteries of paternity and the past. Those mysteries reveal and conceal, rendering the past a space of both uncertainty and recovery: “I teeter between ending and faith.”

–B.K. Fischer, Poet Laureate, Westchester, NY, author of Ceive, Radioapocrypha, My Lover’s Discourse, St. Rage’s Vault, and Mutiny Gallery

Robin Dellabough’s Double Helix speaks with a voice both steely and delicate. These are poems about family, where “[a]n elephant sits in the mid-century modern living room,” about a home that love has furnished with both wrenching sorrow and fierce joy. Dellabough looks unflinchingly at past and present, and likewise into the future, creating poems that combust like the old love letters she torches: “Light match. Wind makes crazy huge flames.”

–Suzanne Cleary, author of Crude Angel, Beauty Mark, Keeping Time, and Trick Pear

https://riverjournalonline.com/communities/irvington/local-authors-local-books-irvington-writer-unlocks-the-mystery-of-her-family/30778/

https://shows.acast.com/the-unmistakable-creative-podcast/episodes/robin-dellabough-how-a-values-driven-career-enables-you-to-b

https://www.easthamptonstar.com/books/2022630/poet-discovers-her-past