Childhood, animals, friendships and love keep returning across a lifetime of poems. Robin Becker gathers a selection from each of her earlier books and adds nearly thirty new ones.
Readical Key Points
- New and selected poems: work from each of Becker's earlier collections, plus nearly thirty poems new to this book
- Forms range from free and blank verse to couplets, quatrains and sonnets
- Content note: grief over a sister's suicide recurs across the collection
- Paperback, 162 pages, UNM Press, 2026; published in the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry series
The poems move through childhood, animals, cherished places, complicated friendships and romantic love, and they hold grief and warmth side by side. Read together, the older selections and the new work let a subject come back years later with more behind it. Becker's formal range shows up across the book, from loose free verse to the tight turn of a sonnet.
Readers who already know Becker's collections, including All-American Girl, can find a selection from those books in one volume, and newcomers to feminist and LGBTQ+ poetry get a broad introduction to her work. Every subject that returns in these pages comes back carrying the years it has lived through.
About the Author
Robin Becker has published eight earlier poetry collections, among them The Black Bear Inside Me and All-American Girl, which won a Lambda Literary Award; both appeared in the Pitt Poetry Series. She is a liberal arts research professor emerita in English and women's studies at Pennsylvania State University.
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