Read an excerpt: “Carrier”

Praise for Carrier

Virginia Robinson is a carrier herself, a woman left behind in wartime to bear the burden of fearing for those she loves, of remembering the lost days of peace before her friends were deployed on those other carriers, Navy ships. She uses the vessels of her own poems to linger in language both riveting and exact among the memories of sweetness, of terror, of loss, all of them honoring those she cared for. This first collection of poems by Virginia Robinson is both highly personal and subtly universal.

— Joan Swift, author of The Tiger Iris

Virginia Robinson balances her bracing, always surprising poems on the knife edge that separates women from men, civilians from soldiers, and beautifully evoked places in North Carolina and California from the unknowable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Boundaries are her subject, and her poems never fall into the predictable genre of "Protest Poem" (the ironic title of her opening poem). Sometimes her poetry has the defamiliarizing effect of Michael Herr’s long prose poem, "Dispatches." Sometimes, like O’Brien’s "The Things They Carried," it touches us and makes us think about paradoxes. It has just the right combination of art and heart.

— Jim Fairhall, author of Dragon Music

This book tells a story that rarely shows up in American poetry. It does so with perfect dramatic pacing, just the right mix of tenderness and detachment, and inventive language.

— Alan Williamson, author of The Pattern More Complicated

About Virginia Robinson

Virginia Robinson Born in 1977 in Washington, DC, Virginia Robinson received her BA from Villanova University’s Honors Program, and her MA in Creative Writing from the University of California at Davis. She teaches English at Francis Parker School in San Diego. Carrier is her first book.

Contact Virginia Robinson: ginny_robinson@yahoo.com