How The Light Gets In

Kirk Robertson is the djinn of the desert whose complex verse exits from the broken jar of its vast solitude. His poems are rendered with a realism so real it is organically surreal, the skilled precision of a whip slashing the sudden end to a line. He s an unequalled word-portraitist of the desert, but also a man of the world, with a lived-in sense of humor and appreciation of women. His love poems gather roughly near-worship, with a solid sense of the body and wary knowledge of the fragility of relationships. This powerful collection evokes a unique landscape spare, unadorned, unforgiving, yet beautiful, open, gently self-mocking, totally dedicated to love and unabashed curiosity. --Andrei Codrescu, So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2012

I first read Kirk Robertson s work 30 years ago in the cab of a U-Haul. I was leaving everything I knew behind, leaving Tulsa, moving to Nevada where the neon, Kirk assures us, beckons us in from the dark, where notes are signed with big lipsticked kisses and no return address, where it s hard to tell the difference between dreamers and fools. His poetry made me see how this starkly beautiful desert was both brutal and tender, how I would find my home at last. Keep this book in your truck, take it wherever you go. It might save you, too. --Gailmarie Pahmeier, The Rural Lives of Nice Girls

Along with Walter Van Tilburg Clark and Robert Laxalt, Kirk Robertson is a Nevada literary pillar. Now finally we have a definitive collection of his work funny, heartbreaking, rugged, and insightful. Robertson s poems are dipped into the heart of the West, both what it used to be and what it is today. How The Light Gets In is breathtaking and necessary reading. I couldn't recommend it more highly. --Willy Vlautin, The Motel Life and The Free