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One especially vexing piece of property, highlighted in Robyn Schiff’s 2016 poetry collection A Woman of Property, is a malfunctioning nursery armchair. Her frustration with the customer service echo chamber flashes bright with her skepticism regarding motherhood generally. She’s contending with the reality that items, which ostensibly only exist to make parenting easier, maybe don’t in fact exist.
In almost all these poems there’s: a nervy tension, no sentimentally, perpetual and well-placed disappointment, righteous warnings, an eye for absurdity, questioning the sanity of everything. In A Woman of Property, the poems feel dug so deep in the moment—and then, whoosh, they zoom out and they’ve seen the whole shape of the culture.
And skeptical motherhood is only one element! There’s also the encroaching era of increasingly unhinged American politics, the disappointing blur of American entertainment, and a controversial stance on the beauty of fragments. I only disagree with one of these (the last one below), but I always think it’s very fun to disagree:
P.S. I interviewed Robyn Schiff about her newest collection of poems, Information Desk, for the New York Times (link here).