Leaves of Class, by Kit Robinson

Description

ISBN 9781946104038

Poetry/Literature

2017

The title of Kit Robinson’s latest is a nod to the Great Includer, and its pages share something of that earlier writer’s peripatetic energy, his constant welcoming. Think also of Monk’s sidewinding testaments, Saul Leiter’s carefully sudden Manhattan kodachromes, Top 40 radio when it (sometimes) used to be challenging. But the call of thought is the tone most often heard—the summons to consider, to praise, to inveigh. Time now to roll up those “vernacular shirt sleeves” and get down to “tuning the work of days.” These are irresistible poems.
— George Albon

Like Whitman, Kit Robinson celebrates himself, the world, and the amplitude of time. In Leaves of Class, we are treated to poetic clarity and a sense of rectitude. Whimsical forays into the boundaries of meaning and language, “You could say poetry publicity puberty probity,” he characterizes planetary currents, of which he knows he is an intrinsic part, as “vertiginous, lofty, cerebral, lazy, and light.” In this collection, Robinson leaves the ecology of self to discover new wilderness. Powerful stuff.
— Anne Tardos