This One Life by Lee Robinson

Lee Robinson’s This One Life is deceptively straightforward and plainspoken.  I say deceptively because the plain style of these poems disguises the extraordinary subtlety of her technique, of the sly rhymes one hears unobtrusively, of the expressive cadences and syntactic shapes that enact their movement through and across the lines the emotional realities they describe.  Robinson writes with surpassing authority on mortality, the indifferent beauty of the natural world, and love.  The hopefulness and great good nature that vitalize every poem are all the more convincing for the darkness they both solicit and fend off. This is a fantastic book of poems, a book I find impossible not to love.

–Alan Shapiro, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Los Angeles Book Prize, author of Reel to Reel and The Last Happy Occasion

Each poem in this collection is a world.  Direct but subtle, replete with honesty, history, rich cadences of voice and memory, Lee Robinson’s poems satisfy our human need for story, grounding, imagery, a wondrous wisdom channeling through all.

–Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems, Winner of the Robert Creeley Award and the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature

In This One Life, Lee Robinson takes us on a vivid road trip through the past in a quest to find out who we are now.  This is the rare collection that makes us feel how the personal is political and how our collective history shadows into our individual and oh-so-particular stories.  What lifts these poems is Robinson’s stubborn humanity—her humor, her large-heartedness, her ability to face hard truths, her recognition of how “the world could be both sweet and sour” as she celebrates what she calls our “luscious roaming in the deep wide dark.”  This is a collection that delves deeply into that most fundamental question of how we should live.

–Sheila Black, author of Radium Dream, co-winner of the Frost-Pellicer Frontera Prize