Three Count Pour Chapbooks : Elizabeth Robinson + Randy Prunty,

 

“baptism”

What if a hand

came from behind,

 

if it wetted the hair. A gesture that neither 

understood nor misunderstood

 

what the hand could measure

when the sound was not water, was

 

instead

the fall of nakedness from

the body. The surrender, the squander, the thing

that could not adhere, submerged below its surface. (Elizabeth Robinson)

I’m intrigued by these lovely new chapbooks by American poets Elizabeth Robinson and Randy Prunty, apparently two of a cluster of four new chapbooks by Bay Area poets produced in 2025 by Three Count Pour, an imprint of Chicago publisher selva obscura press—Robinson’s for the catechists (2025) and Prunty’s Gravity Catches All Things (2025). Elizabeth Robinson is the author of a slew of poetry books and chapbooks over the past two-plus decades—see my review of her latest, vulnerability index (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, 2025), for example—and this new title follows her relatively more recent trajectory into elements of faith, offering lyric conversations through and around scripture. What is interesting, also, is how the book is structured as a kind of abecedarian, offering fourteen lettered section-clusters, most of which hold but one or two poems, but the section “s” holding six poems, with all poem titles within each section beginning with that section’s featured letter. That same “s” section, for example, offering poems “sacred heart,” “shofar,” “shroud,” “sola scriptura,” “soul” and “spirit.” The abecedarian structure hints, perhaps, at a far larger collection of these pieces, which is interesting, and something I would be eager to see. Robinson’s language is sharp and dense, and there’s an approach to and through her subject matter propelled, first and foremost, through the language. “Echolalic with odor,” she writes, as part of the poem “carnal,” “the creature is able to smile, to fill / countenance with perception, mill / its arms around, its legs, loll or hunt / its field, its plural. /// Critter in fur, incarnate howl, / call, mineral tang of voice, voice stalled. Its / whiff transferred, diurnal. Only paw and pall, little /// hell of beingness, crawl to haven.” I haven’t seen much of Randy Prunty’s work prior to this, but the title of his Gravity Catches All Things is quite good, I must say. The pieces assembled here are composed as fourteen word/line sonnets, one word per line, what Ottawa poet Seymour Mayne has referred to as “word sonnets,” although Prunty’s are far more precise, exact. There’s such thinking between these lines, these words; such marvellous density, one word set upon another, offering a kind of silence throughout each piece, even as the poem speaks. One hopes that, or even wonders if, Prunty’s reading style allows for the line breaks, the spaces between words, and not the way Canadian poet Ken Norris once told me of the reading style of American poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963): reading sans line break, as though his poems but a kind of ongoing sentence, making one wonder why those line breaks were even there at all.

Back Porch Sonnet

When
there’s
no
space
between
thinking
it
and
saying
it,
you
know
you’re
home.

 

Elizabeth Robinson, vulnerability index

 

Meth-filled rage that makes the man’s screams audible over a two-block range. Rage that enables him to heave a heavy rock overhead into the shelter doorway.

+

His backpack, after the police have hauled him away, filled with vitamin supplements and a carton of two dozen eggs, now mostly broken open, seeping into his few pieces of clothing.

= (“EQUATIONS THAT HAVE NO FINAL PRODUCT”)

As the back cover offers, this latest title by American poet and editor Elizabeth Robinson, vulnerability index (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, 2026), was composed across a six year period the author spent “working with chronically unhoused people in Boulder, Colorado, [as] her relationships with the community’s most vulnerable deepened—even as they were filtered through a web of paperwork, systems, and strictures. The questionnaire known as the ‘vulnerability index’ is just one such system. Ubiquitous in shelters across America, it is representative of the endless tasks that people living on the street must complete to receive even minor assistance.” The award-winning author of nearly two dozen collections—including In the Sequence of Falling Things (Paradigm, 1990), Bed of Lists (Kelsey Street, 1990), House Made of Silver (Kelsey Street, 2000), Harrow (Omnidawn, 2001), Pure Descent (Sun & Moon, 2003), Apprehend (Fence/Apogee, 2004), Apostrophe (Apogee, 2006), Under That Silky Roof (Burning Deck, 2006), The Orphan and Its Relations (Fence, 2008), Also Known As (Apogee, 2009), Three Novels (Omnidawn, 2011) [see my review of such here], Counterpart (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2012) [see my review of such here], blue heron (Center for Literary Publishing, 2013) [see my review of such here], On Ghosts (Solid Objects, 2013) [see my review of such here], Rumor (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2018) [see my review of such here], Excursive (New York NY: Roof Books, 2023) [see my review of such here], Thirst & Surfeit (High Point NC: Threadsuns, 2023) [see my review of such here] and the collaborative Rendered Paradise (with Susanne Dyckman; Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2024) [see my review of such here]—Robinson served six years as a Minister in the Community and Poet in Residence at Community United Church of Christ in Boulder before returning to the Bay Area, California, where she is currently a senior pastor at Orinda Community Church.

The poems in vulnerability index are almost composted as sketch-notes or journal entries-as-poems, offering an array of stories, threads and narratives from her immediate and daily lived experience across that period, focusing on the people she encountered during those years; tales of beauty and kindness across stories of heartbreak and desperation; of people that, as the tale goes, fall through the cracks, are failed by the system. “After I got out of jail,” the poem “NECESSARY LIES” includes, “my mother kicked me and my kids / out of her house. So I told them that my husband / was beating us and held us like we were in prison. That he / locked us, me and the three kids, in a tiny little room and made / us pee in a bottle. He threw a dish of food in and we had to just / eat it off the plate, like we were dogs. Yeah, / I said that / to get us into the shelter.” The poems in this collection seek to respond, document and record; they seek to reconcile an array of people from different backgrounds and experiences all landing in a similar situation, some due to mental health struggles, others due to unemployment, failed relationships, addiction or gendered violence. “A man holds this in a syringe,” the poem “A VEIN IS A PARABLE” reads, “all that he knows and cannot read, like a needle that has no compass: arrow misguided to a heart and back again to fingertips. // The almost-black sludge that rolls and collapses within himself. Like that nib of a pen that cannot scratch out any script, absent its ink.” The poems are composed in a more, relatively, straightforward manner than I’m aware of her work, focusing on the narratives, perhaps, over where the language might lead. It is as though working to articulate these stories, these experiences, have set the music of her language a bit more into the background, although allowing a clarity that shines the language through; providing a quieter, even more subtle music. As the poem “AFTER THE FLOOD” writes:

Here's the gap,
the place where we once knew solid ground
and now is all movement—

  

Calling over the man who was flying a sign at Arapahoe and Broadway,
I handed him the thawing, sloppy food I’d carried down the flooded hill. 

Stupid with trauma. All of us.

 

The loudspeaker blaring, Leave immediately. Seek higher ground. 

But the flood didn’t simply rise from below,
it rushed down from above.

There is something interesting, as well, in how this new collection could be paired with the Reverend Canon Maggie Helwig’s remarkably powerful non-fiction Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2025), a title that recently won the Toronto Book Award. Toronto’s Maggie Helwig, as with Robinson, is also a poet who gravitated towards religious and community service, focusing on vulnerable communities in her immediate vicinity, even in conflict with local agencies for the sake of her charges (as she lays out in her new book). In two countries, two poets of similar age both enter the clergy, and began working with unhoused communities, subsequently responding to those experiences through writing. One might say that both of these are examples of writing that responds to a particular approach to service, to action, which might be a chicken-or-egg distinction (splitting hairs, perhaps) over the political writing and lived action of Vancouver poets Stephen Collis [see my review of his Once in Blockadia] and Christine Leclerc [see my review of her Oilywood] through their part in protesting the Kinder Morgan Pipeline, or even a book such as Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas [see my review of such here]. Writing, either way, as simultaneously-lived action. As Robinson writes as part of her “Introduction”:

For the six years I worked day to day with people experiencing homelessness, I thought I had stopped writing poems. I thought I was too engrossed in what I was experiencing to write. It turns out that I was wrong. At some point, I started looking at my computer desktop and realizing it was full of writing. Was it poetry? I don’t know. It was certainly me trying to hold on to the fast-moving current of experience and absorb it. My writing, however scattershot, became a constellation of attentions that helped me into relationship with a distinct and dynamic community.

 

On Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson’s Rendered Paradise

My review of Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson's collaborative Rendered Paradise (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2024) is now online at Seneca Review.

Elizabeth Robinson, Thirst & Surfeit

 

Mary Reade

While I was captive,
I saw that horizon rhymes with reason.

And like so, the shape of the roof
beckons the hull of a boat.

It’s the sun who decides, in the end,
whether the sea is a plateau or a well and how
such will clang on the atmosphere.

I was captive until I fell off the edge where the great heat
made me captain

of its lull and its whitecap.

I am mistress, now, of similarities.
My reason is to take and take now
as the horizon takes from me

or toward:

the bowed edge of a vessel never
secure or heal. The untoward advance

of light arrests

this surface as given.

Zig-zagging freedom to illumine
what I’ve wrested.

Reason rejects the curve.

The latest from American poet and editor Elizabeth Robinson is the collection Thirst & Surfeit (High Point NC: Threadsuns, 2023), a collection that follows a sequence of historical threads, offering themes-as-section titles, seven in all: “The Bog Traverse 1200-600 B.C.E.,” “Hovenweep 1200-1300 C.E.,” “Anne Hutchinson 1591-1643,” “Two Pirates 1690-1782,” “Ferdinand Gregorovius 1821-1891,” “The Canudos Rebellion, Brazil 1893-1897” and “2023,” a section that holds but the single poem “Legion.” There’s an incredible precision to these pieces, an extended stretch of poems on exploration and response across the veil of what might appear to be a scattered list of historical moments and eras. What holds these different time-periods together? “What we’ve shared in common / has made us sink.” she writes, to open the poem “Disappearance,” set as part of the penultimate section. “The earth floor, / swept clean so many times / clings to speech. Ubiquitous // sunlight / shows us these particles // as we dwindle beneath them.” Again, what ties these periods together? “History,” as the cover flap of the collection offers, “like ‘light untied and undone,’ disperses itself across time and memory. The poems in Thirst & Surfeit reach into these fragments to interpret and sing interactions of human and environment, spirit and subsistence.” One might suggest that the connecting tissue between time-periods and their resulting lyrics are simply Robinson’s approach and attentions, striking lyrics on how so much remains unchanged between such temporal lengths, such as the weight of a moment, or how uncertainty and accountability are as much explored as the details of each particular era, as the opening poem of the second section reads:

You are not now what you were meant to be. And this is why mirages are without irony.

So hurry: the precipate falls hard onto forgetful dirt. The external, like rain, jars you.

There are stretches of miles, of the unexpected; they menace and recant. You prefer that the haste drop you off like a passenger, into tedium. You are in brambles that annoy but do not scratch.

 

A cartoonish body waits outside yours, whistling and smirking.

The precipitous

falls sodden-to-itself, to shoulders like yours, piggyback.
Hard. Finally, hurtful: this patience.
The trees named for Joshua pick up their arms, plainly out of obedience.

There is an interesting structural shift in this collection, beyond what she’s worked in some of her more recent collections, composing a handful of collections via short lyric response poems, each titled on the variation of “On _____,” from her Excursive (New York NY: Roof Books, 2023) [see my review of such here] and On Ghosts (Solid Objects, 2013) [see my review of such here]. The poems of Thirst & Surfeit offer a blend of structures, from the fragmented long-poem effect of the second section, the self-contained compactness of the prose poems that make up the book’s opening section, to the dual pirate poems that deliberately work to play off each other. The effect is curious, akin to an anthology of sorts, as though the form through which she responds is as important a shift as her temporal zones and subject matter. “We measure vastness by the limit of our mortal life.” She writes, to open the poem “Salvation,” set as part of the “Anne Hutchinson” section. “I would have you look, as example, at the face of the clock. It is a face, // even as it cherishes its own absent mouth and closed eyes. Its example we // should emulate.” It is almost as though she is attempting to capture something larger, and ongoing, with each collection that preceded this one all part of what went into this singular and multitudinous work, a heft of lyric across eighty pages.