Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series
University of New Mexico Press
ISBN 9780826369338
Purchase: University of New Mexico Press
Midsummer Count collects the best work of Robin Becker, considered by many to be the foremost feminist poet of her generation. With selections from each of her previously published books and nearly thirty new poems, readers enter Becker’s lifelong exploration of childhood, animals, cherished places, complex friendships, and romantic intimacy. A life-affirming current yokes these narratives across time, even as a sister’s early suicide haunts the decades. In blank and free verse, in couplets, quatrains, and sonnets, the poet wrestles formal tensions, creating a present-day idiom for beauty, grief, and compassion.
Press
Poetry Foundation Interview with Rachel Mennies
Review by Marianne Cotugno in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 2
Review by Vivienne Crawford in the Pittsburgh Review of Books
Review by Ellen Miller-Mack in Wild Shrew Literary Review
“As ‘the whole wrecked world / slides into tomorrow,’ Robin Becker’s art seeks beauty but does not look away from its opposite. Becker’s poems use memorable figuration (compassion is a horse, lies are carpenter bees), painterly detail, and psychological insight, infused with the poet’s inimitable warmth and wit. Truths about women’s lives (Muriel Rukeyser’s plea) shine like silver in this book.”
—Natasha Saje, author of The Future Will Call You Something Else: Poems
“Robin Becker’s voice as a poet is unique. It is complex. There’s a rasp in it, but also a sweet viola. She is very American, and a world traveler. She addresses our speeding time and vast space with intelligence, passion, and nuance. She could eat ham on wry, except that she’s a Jew who celebrates ‘the sounds of Yiddish.’ Her poems are wonderfully full of animals, especially horses. Her family portraits are abloom with vitality and suffering—and humor, as in this one of her father as ‘the self-inventing Polish immigrant’s / son, transformed / by American tools into Errol Flynn.’ Tracking the glamor and ordinariness of queerness, she dreams herself ‘a handsome specimen in bright plumage / recognizable on the wing.’ You have to love a poet who says ‘Connecticut is a long / aquamarine word,’ and who is deeply aware that ‘Hands go to the heart to acknowledge / life as blessed.’ Reader, take this ride with Robin Becker’s career and be illuminated, enlivened, and enriched.”
—Alicia Ostriker, author of The Holy & Broken Bliss
“Robin Becker is one of our essential poets. She is a born storyteller, and in this legacy book she tells the story of her life, her heartbreaks along the way increasing her heart-breaking powers. Yet her story does not end with her sorrows, for it is leavened by grace and love and the possibility of reaching beyond obstacles and fear to find, in life and in art, places of perfect affection.”
—Wesley McNair, author of Late Wonders: New and Selected Poems
“For decades, and certainly since her Lambda Literary Award-winning All-American Girl, Robin Becker has inspired and instructed us on how to be the portrait of the artist as a Jewish woman, a lesbian, a sister, a daughter, a lover, a traveler, and a teacher of the craft of poetry. With grace and grit, the poems that span her career now reside together in one volume to magnify their mastery and thematic conversations over time.”
—Sandra Yannone, author of The Glass Studio
