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.

 

essays in the face of uncertainties

“There are more important things than living.” Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick says to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, explaining his push to re-open the economy. I don’t even know how to process this, how there are those who see human life as disposable, compared to what they see as the needs of the economy. There are terrible, awful, stupid people everywhere, and I know certain of them manage positions that allow them particular platforms, and particular levels of power, all of which seems frightening. I’m baffled at this dismissal of human life, and its exactly the opposite of everything western media culture has taught us to believe. From World War II films to Star Trek to westerns (which might all be the same, single genre, really): Leave no man behind.

It just seems so blatant: how the working poor will be the ones bearing the brunt of these decisions. It seems utterly heartless, and utterly cruel.

I’ve been seeking out my copy of a collection of essays by Alice Notley, feeling as though she might have something appropriate to offer in response. How does one write, or even continue, in the face of such arrogance, such culturally self-defeating attempts to keep money flowing into the coffers of the already-wealthy? The more one has accumulated, I’ve heard theorized, the more one becomes terrified of losing it all. The more one is willing to sacrifice another to maintain.

Christine and I were discussing it yesterday, of an American mythology built, essentially, around Libertarianism: a notion of individual liberty that becomes twisted to the point that a lock-down for the sake of a global pandemic and the continued safety and health of the American population is regarded as trampling on personal rights. How the government is out to get you, clearly. A disease created in a lab so they could take away your rights, your guns, your freedoms. Stories emerging of those who have died from Covid-19, including numerous Americans who declared the outbreak a hoax, or no worse than the flu. The dozens of pastors across the Bible Belt that have died after previously dismissing concerns, refusing to shut down services and downplaying any need for self-distancing. By the end of April, the Independent reports: “As many as 30 church leaders from the nation’s largest African American Pentecostal denomination have now been confirmed to have died in the outbreak, as members defied public health warnings to avoid large gatherings to prevent transmitting the virus.” Fox News editorials and round-tables spent weeks perpetuating dismissals of such preventative measures, but behind the scenes, did everything they could to work from home. There are those who would call this, too, a hoax. How does one protect anything against such willful ignorance? Not that we’re free of such in our country, either. Is there a difference?

I’ve been cleaning out further parts of my home office, a mound of books, chapbooks and papers at the base of a bookshelf, as well as a corner overrun with paper archive, eventually set to be organized and sent off to the University of Calgary. If you can imagine it, I’ve already some ninety banker’s boxes worth of literary archive sitting in their stores. And yet, there is no sign of that Alice Notley title.

Instead, I spend part of the morning rereading Maggie Helwig’s debut collection of essays, Apocalypse Jazz (1993), reminded of just how damned smart she is, writing on apocalypse, Bob Dylan, Northrup Frye and Japanese literature post-Hiroshima. As she writes on Shakespeare’s The Tempest:

            We are all, necessarily, aware that the material world is an ambiguous thing. It may be brought to our service, even destroyed by us, but never willingly so; it is, for us, a strange combination of ally, slave and enemy. Or, to put it in terms that an Elizabethan would have understood, the Fall of man from Eden brought about a corresponding fall in nature; we, the cosmos, and our relationship with it are profoundly “out of joint.” And only when we are redeemed will the world be redeemed as well.

Roughly a decade after this collection appeared in print, Helwig was ordained an Anglican priest. There are times I envy her parishioners their access to her insights. I move through an essay by the late Kevin Killian from Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (2004): “How did I write a whole book? I’m trying to remember.” “In the beginning,” Paul Auster writes, to open his Report from the Interior (2013), “everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts, and even the clouds had names. Scissors could walk, telephones and teapots were first cousins, eyes and eyeglasses were brothers. The face of the clock was a human face, each pea in your bowl had a different personality, and the grille on the front of your parents’ car was a grinning mouth with many teeth. Pens were airships. Coins were flying saucers. The branches were arms. Stones could think, and God was everywhere.”

And yet, an article floats through from the University of Guelph, a news item from their website, “U of G Expert Says Pandemic Response Proves Changes to Protect Earth Are Possible.” The article focuses on poet Madhur Anand, “a University of Guelph expert in global change ecology and sustainability”: “What Anand thinks all of us can learn from this unique year is that rapid societal changes are possible and that social norms can change.”

I’m going to hold on to that. Might it be enough?

essays in the face of uncertainties