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”)
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.
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