Books
Poetry
Quarantina
Lavender Ink, 2022
Kit Robinson’s Quarantina is a poetic diary that extends his practice of the discontinuous present into the history of our current global crises.
“These poems hit quick and smolder, jammed with content.” — Syd Staiti
Use coupon code “quarantina” to receive a 30% discount through April 15, 2022.
Thought Balloon
Roof Books, 2019
“Thought Balloon covers a remarkable range of subjects, registers – jazz, rock, television, forests, seashores, cities. This is not the closed territory of an ‘I’ endlessly mapping itself and its adventures. Instead, what we have is the intense, always precise and nuanced articulation of what Blanchot called ‘the scattered totality of the world.’ “– Larry Price
Leaves of Class
Chax, 2017
“Like Whitman, Kit Robinson celebrates himself, the world, and the amplitude of time. In this collection, he leaves the ecology of self to discover new wilderness. Powerful stuff.” — Anne Tardos
Review by Jessica Sequeira
Marine Layer
BlazeVOX, 2015
“As Kit Robinson’s Marine Layer lifts, we can see how far the work of this major American poet has come.” — Andrew Joron
Catalan Passages
Streets and Roads, 2015
Available from the Author
In 2015, I revived the Streets and Roads imprint to publish Catalan Passages, a chapbook containing nine poems and fourteen photos from a 2014 visit to Barcelona, printed in an edition of 150 copies and distributed hors commerce.
About Streets and Roads
A Mammal of Style
with Ted Greenwald
Roof Books, 2013
“A Mammal of Style is funny and swell. Greenwald and Robinson, two great mammals of the American idiom, combine ingenuities to make ordinary language sing.” — Nada Gordon
Review by Norman Fischer
Determination
Cuneiform Press, 2010
“Steering clear of the monolithic and homogenous, Determination distributes its thematic values — will and constraint — along a number of formal axes. Neither a monument to morose modernity nor a Cheshire grin of flippant postmodernity, Determination affirms that a ‘shard of pavement,’ ‘dumped here in this yard for no evident / reason,’ is:
displaced in purpose and time,
in dubious relation to others of its
kind, neither self-sufficient nor adequately integral
to a larger project only barely perceptible
as such. But such is life.”
— Tyrone Williams
Review by Tyrone Williams
Train I Ride
BookThug, 2009
Out of Print
An edition of 200 copies in conjunction with a reading given by the author in Toronto at Press Club, 31 March, 2009. Designed & bound by Jay MillAr.
Review by Alan Davies
The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems 1976-2003
Adventures in Poetry, 2009
“The Messianic Trees (cue organ music) is a xylophone for the soul; poems that refresh eye and mind and shift for a second glance.” — Tom Raworth
Review by Kyle Schlesinger
Review by Curtis Faville
The Crave
Atelos, 2002
Written at the turn of a new century, the poems in this book skirt the fringes of love and business, form and emptiness, the spaces between things, home and a restless movement from place to place. San Diego, Ensenada, Detroit, Buffalo, London, New York, Poipu, Las Vegas, Cabo San Lucas, Berlin and New Orleans are where some of them were written.
Cloud Eight
with Alan Bernheimer
Sound & Language, 1999
Out of Print
Published by cris cheek’s Sound & Language in the UK, this set of five extended collaborations dates from 1971 to 1998.
Democracy Boulevard
Roof Books, 1999
“Democracy Boulevard is the accident-strewn one-way street studded with industrial parks and hospitality suites that dead-ends just in front of the fortress of Consolidated Capital.”
— Steve Evans
Review by Publishers Weekly
Review by Brian Strang
Ode on Visiting the Belosaraisk Spit on the Sea of Azov
by Ilya Kutik
translated by Kit Robinson
Alef, 1995
“Kutik’s Ode is truly magnificent in both Russian and English. What music! What compactness and wit! And imagery: those ‘Hamlet-like gulls’!” — Charles Simic
Available from the Translator
Balance Sheet
Roof Books, 1993
“Balance Sheet is just that, a various, wry look at apparent life both inside and out at midpoint, balanced in the battering flux of myriad informations, all as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ as ever. Kit Robinson’s reflective work is articulate and compelling witness to the ominous signs of our time.”
— Robert Creeley
Individuals
with Lyn Hejinian
Chax Press, 1988
Out of Print
Kit Robinson on Individuals
Lyn Hejinian on Individuals
A Day Off
State One, 1985
Out of Print
Published by Steve Farmer’s State One press in Oakland.
Windows
Whale Cloth, 1985
Available from the Author
From Michael Waltuch’s Whale Cloth press, Windows comprises 11 extended works written between 1977 and 1983. It is perhaps my most experimental book.
Riddle Road
Tuumba, 1982
Out of Print
“The mysterious final line of another poem, ‘Tree Vagrancy’ — ‘I find in the world’ — works as a sort of internal revelation of Robinson’s procedure in this book. Kit Robinson ‘finds in the world’ a brilliant conundrum, a riddle as intricate as the shimmering nets of suggestion that connect words and things.”
— Tom Clark
Review by Tom Clark (The Poetry Project Newsletter, #96, page 8)
Tribute to Nervous
Tuumba, 1980
Out of Print
Volume 26 in Lyn Hejinian’s legendary Tuumba series.
Down and Back
The Figures, 1978
Out of Print
From Geoff Young and Laura Chester’s The Figures press, this book includes my early poem, “In the American Tree.”
The Dolch Stanzas
This, 1976
Out of Print
An early publication of Barrett Watten’s This Press, The Dolch Stanzas was printed at the West Coast Print Center in Berkeley and sold for $1. An online edition was prepared by Whale Cloth Press in 2003.
Review by Michael Gottlieb
Chinatown of Cheyenne
Kit Robinson’s first book, published at the Whale Cloth Press, Iowa City, Iowa, nineteen hundred seventy-four. One hundred copies were printed by Michael Waltuch.
Out of Print