Michael Robbins

A collection of humorous and inventive poems that combine pop culture references from Star Wars to Fleetwood Mac from the poet whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's and The Village Voice. Original.

Alien Vs. Predator

Brilliant, illuminating criticism from a superstar poet—a refreshing, insightful look at how works of art, specifically poetry and popular music, can serve as essential tools for living. How can art help us make sense—or nonsense—of the world? If wrong life cannot be lived rightly, as Theodor Adorno had it, what weapons and strategies for living wrongly can art provide? With the same intelligence that animates his poetry, Michael Robbins addresses this weighty question while contemplating the idea of how strange it is that we need art at all. Ranging from Prince to Def Leppard, Lucille Clifton to Frederick Seidel, Robbins’s mastery of poetry and popular music shines in Equipment for Living. He has a singular ability to illustrate points with seemingly disparate examples (Friedrich Kittler and Taylor Swift, to W.B. Yeats and Anna Kendrick’s “Cups”). Robbins weaves a discussion on poet Juliana Spahr with the different subsets of Scandinavian black metal, illuminating subjects in ways that few scholars can achieve. Equipment for Living is also a wonderful guide to essential poetry and popular music.

On Poetry and Pop Music

Equipment for Living

Patricia Lockwood

Timothy Thornton

The 'Penguin Modern Poets' are succinct guides to the richness and diversity of contemporary poetry. Every volume brings together representative selections from the work of three poets now writing, allowing the curious reader and the seasoned lover of poetry to encounter the most exciting voices of our moment.

Controlled Explosions

Penguin Modern Poets 2

A new collection from an audacious, humorous poet celebrated for his "sky-blue originality of utterance" (Dwight Garner, The New York Times) Michael Robbins's first two books of poetry were raucous protests lodged from the frontage roads and big-box stores of off-ramp America. With Walkman, he turns a corner. These new poems confront self-pity and nostalgia in witty-miserable defiance of our political and ecological moment. It's the end of the world, and Robbins has listened to all the tapes in his backpack. So he's making music from whatever junk he finds lying around.

Walkman

First published in 1953, at the time this book was the most comprehensive history and description of an English county ever attempted in a single volume. Its first part describes the county's natural situation and its earliest history and surveys its economic life, not least its almost vanished agriculture and its modern industrial development. There are chapters on particular aspects of Middlesex's history, inhabitants and buildings. The second part - virtually a book in itself - is a lively gazetteer of the places in contemporary Middlesex, from Action to Yiewsley. The whole work is fully indexed and referenced, and includes tables of population and a detailed bibliography (both updated for this edition), line maps, diagrams and 48 pages of superb photographs.

Middlesex

A second collection from a poet of “sheer joy and dizzy command” (The New York Times) Upon its publication in 2012, Alien vs. Predator, the debut collection by Michael Robbins, became one of the hottest and most celebrated works of poetry in the country, winning acclaim for its startling freshness and originality, and leading critics to say that it was the most likely book in years to open up poetry to a new readership. Robbins’s poems are strange, wonderful, wild, and irrationally exuberant, mashing up high and low culture with “a sky-blue originality of utterance” (The New York Times). The thirty-six new poems in The Second Sex carry over the music, attitude, hilarity, and vulgarity of Alien vs. Predator, while also working deeper autobiographical and political veins.

The Second Sex

Psychoanalysis Meets Psychosis proposes a major revision of the psychoanalytic theory of the most severe mental illnesses including schizophrenia. Freud believed that psychosis is the consequence of a biologically determined inability to attain and sustain a normal or neurotic mental organization. Michael Robbins proposes instead that psychosis is the outcome of a different developmental pathway. Conscious mind functions in two qualitatively different ways, primordial conscious mentation and reflective representational thought, and psychosis is the result of persistence of a primordial mental process, which is adaptive in infancy, in later situations in which it is neither appropriate nor adaptive. In Part I Robbins describes how the medical model of psychosis underlies the current approach of both psychiatry and psychoanalysis, despite the fact that neuroscience has failed to confirm the model’s basic organic assumption. In Part II Robbins examines two of Freud’s models of psychosis that are based on the assumption of a constitutional inability to develop a normal or neurotic mind. The theories of succeeding generations of analysts have for the most part reiterated the biases of Freud’s two models, so that psychoanalysis considers the psychoses beyond its scope. In Part III Robbins proposes that the psychoses are the result of disturbances in the attachment-separation phase of development, leading to maladaptive persistence of a primordial form of mental activity related to Freud’s primary process. Finally, in Part IV Robbins describes a psychoanalytic approach to treatment based on his model. The book is richly illustrated with material from Robbins’ clinical practice. Psychoanalysis Meets Psychosis has the potential to undo centuries of alienation between society and psychotic persons. The book offers an understanding of severe mental illness that will be novel and inspiring not only to psychoanalysts but to all mental health professionals.

Attachment, Separation, and the Undifferentiated Unintegrated Mind

Psychoanalysis Meets Psychosis

In 1987 Mike Robbins, a 30-year-old London journalist, decided on a change of lifestyle and signed up for two years as an overseas volunteer. Some weeks later he found himself standing with his luggage in the middle of a featureless baked-earth plain in Eastern Sudan. It was over 100 deg F in the shade. And there was no shade. This is Robbins's account of the two years that followed, working with the Sudan Government in the last months of a failed democratic experiment, as the country coped with hundreds of thousands of refugees in the aftermath of the 1980s famine. But it is also a personal account of life as a development volunteer in a surprising, sometimes inspiring, country.

Even the Dead Are Coming

The Penguin Modern Poets are succinct guides to the richness and diversity of contemporary poetry. Every volume brings together representative selections from the work of three poets now writing, allowing the curious reader and the seasoned lover of poetry to encounter the most exciting voices of our moment. "Is it any wonder I've got too much blood on my hands? The calls are coming from inside the house. I'm sick of my insane demands." - Michael Robbins, 'Peel Off the Scabs' ". . . The childhood of the dunk was no childhood at all. He practiced on a paper route, throwing The Sun to the same place each morning. Did not sleep long but when he slept, the springs of his bed imparted something to him. At night the streetlight floated down and let him dribble it." - Patricia Lockwood, 'The Descent of the Dunk' "if my signal drops it's because i've climbed with them, we're so high now i can in one single inverted yawn of my eyes full of skin and sex and fury see the whole city i so slowly streetlamp by streetlamp from the other side spent my life seeing in a drowning "and this one boy here he's doing he's doing a painting, it's the last day of august, it's a painting of a bed and" - Timothy Thornton, 'Voicemail for David Hoyle'

Michael Robbins

Books

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