People You May Know

The poems in Michael Robins’s fourth collection grapple with the cadences of language and the implacable push of time. At the threshold where domestic and natural landscapes meet, People You May Know forges its own path between the ebb and flow—the flood and flicker—of loss and lamentation. But the clear-eyed dawn is rarely far away in these stanzas, which rise from calamity and failure in order to discover comfort and a capacity for renewal. Here, every absence creates a space for the shared experience known among friends and strangers, those wondrous lives that precede and illuminate our own.

Michael Robins is the author of four collections of poetry, including In Memory of Brilliance & Value (2015) and People You May Know (2020), both from Saturnalia Books. He lives in the Portage Park neighborhood of Chicago.