Mass for Shut-Ins

“The poems in Todd Robinson’s Mass for Shut-Ins are simultaneously societal and intensely personal, gleaned through a lens of unifying solitariness, the sense that ‘We, anonymous cannon-fodder’ share more than we’ve ever differed, our burden of impermanence both unique and unexceptional.”—David Z. Drees, WSC Press
 
 
“Todd Robinson has written such tender love poems in Mass for Shut-Ins that you might read them to your significant other and hope for success—a veritable Neruda of Nebraska. In ‘Skin,’ the speaker is ‘a soft / ravening / hominid torched / by rosewater/ & coconut oil.’ The poems are no less fervent toward the old sod, beautifully evoking the contemporary Midwest. He feels ‘the jolt of coal trains / through the gut of steaming America.’ A splendid debut.”—Terese Svoboda, author of Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship
“Todd Robinson is a poet doing his best to figure a life; doing it with a fair share of humor, but also seriously, honestly, as though he and the rest of us weren’t in the throes of a new century already torn to a nub of ‘real work and sorrow.’”—David Wyatt, author of Gathering Place
 
“Todd Robinson’s Mass for Shut-Ins is a book of love poems to intimacy, especially at its most awkward and marvelous, the passing of time, grandmothers, television, wounded fathers, chain-smoking mothers, a childhood of weather-cracked heartland towns, skies that are ‘meth-white’ and ‘Lutheran,’ and even to behaviors that do us harm. Robinson’s book is one of praise, and the world needs this poet and these beautiful poems.”—Miles Waggener, author of Superstition Freeway
 
 
“Such a bounty of intelligence and pleasure packed inside here! These are deeply lovable love songs, odes to friends and lovers, the sound of crickets and grackles, BB guns and boozy evenings on the Plains. To me they manage to be cheerful even when they’re heartbreaking. So here’s to you, Mr. Robinson.”—Kurt Andersen, author of Fantasyland