Sit How You Want

Power and sex take centre stage in Robin Richardson’s formidable third collection, Sit How You Want. Plane crashes and automobile mishaps are the backdrop for female narrators who grapple with terror, anxiety, and powerlessness: “When I say I’m fine I mean the sky has opened / like an old wound under scurvy.” In their grim wit, sinister straight talk, and sometimes violent bawdiness, Richardson’s poems work as counter-charms against the lingering trauma of abusive relationships, both familial and romantic. The book embodies a belief in poetry as an instrument of change, a tool for transforming pain into exuberant verbal energy: “It is the thrill of ruination / makes us innovate.”

Reviews

“Richardson proclaims that now is the hour of independence and bravura… Her poems are rambunctious but bleak in outlook. Hints of danger are everywhere.” – Nicholas Bradley, Canadian Literature

“Robin Richardson’s poems take no prisoners, have a strange and authentic music all their own, and mark her … as one of the best young poets of her generation.”– Thomas Lux

“Richardson uses the poetic image like a tourniquet on the eyes while a self-aware wound is inflicted elsewhere in the imagination.”– Margaret Christakos