A Ruckus of Awkward Stacking

Susan McKnight is an administrator of the Courts Technology Integrated Justice Project at the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.

Each poem in this collection is based on a memory of some kind—some
pleasant, some heartwrenching. Robinson’s astounding ability to relate
natural phenomena to deep human emotions is established in Part 1, and
especially in the first poem, “The Language of Flowers”: “when
speech fails we learn to communicate in / a syntax of bloom and /
stem-length inflections.” His use of familiar objects to delineate
larger truths permeates the verse in Part 2, “A Sort of Lip-Read
Language.” The emotional core of the book is Part 3, which relates the
long illness, death, and funeral of the poet’s mother. Parts 4 and 5
continue his quest to make some sense of life through comparisons to
natural phenomena.

Robinson’s poems have appeared in several literary journals,
including The Antigonish Review, Canadian Literature, and Grain. A
Ruckus of Awkward Stacking is a memorable debut collection.