Michael Robins is the author of The Next Settlement (UNT Press, 2007), which received the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, and the chapbook Circus(Flying Guillotine, 2009).

Other poems by Michael Robins in Verse Daily:
October 19, 2011:   "Anthem" "I had yet imagined a stream fed in feather...."
June 5, 2008:   "I Wanted More Than I Could Steal" "Instead the opening, the end, the tunnel..."
May 1, 2007:   "Plunder" " The heart, which often seems a gangplank..."
December 29, 2005:   "Gray Gone Missing" " & though a needle drops among the stacks..."

Books by Michael Robins:

Other poems on the web by Michael Robins:
Four poems
Two poems
"Circus"
Two poems
Five poems
Three poems
"Our Homes on the Same Street"

Michael Robins's Website.

About Ladies & Gentlemen:

"Michael Robins’ Ladies & Gentlemen is a tour de force into a world where the magic of living still dares to go. It is an alternate world where dead deer are more living when dead, where stories are always told wrong, where ‘a milky skin…settles each thing,’ where we fall in love with mysterious Anna ‘basked in perfume,’ and where foxes become commas and with animal bodies split the long-traveled roads. The magic of the book lies also in that Robins does almost the whole thing up in glorious couplets. And if couplets were to be a formal metaphor for the book, it would be that in these poems a source of love and wonder always has its negative evil. And to show us both light and dark is what this book (thankfully) aims to do."
—Dorothea Lasky

"As its title intimates, Ladies & Gentlemen proceeds with a seething civility and Robins' measured couplets, a failing brace, belie the aggressions we've suffered and inflicted as a nation. His poems interrogate citizenship against the backdrop of violence at home and abroad--after a decade of war, where do we stand? Robins' answer is not easy: "difficult to stand if standing / is stance, the wedge between citizen & me." These poems speak to us "beyond our spangles," seeking and even finding intimacy amid the ruins of empire."
—James Shea