Click a link below to pre-order Eschatology in Crayon Wax! Releases February 2024!
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Texas Review Press
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Texas Review Press
Photo by John Hernandez
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Pre-Order Now! Releases Feb '24
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Praise for Eschatology in Crayon Wax
In Eschatology in Crayon Wax, Robbins achieves a miraculous balance between doubt, hope, and despair. These are poems that desperately want to praise, but never at the price of dishonesty. The beauty that we witness here survives in a suffering world—and is more compelling for it. Easily one of the best books I’ve read this year. — Michael Shewmaker, author of Leviathan.
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Joshua Robbins’ new book is a collection of modern psalms of pain and pleading, making doubt a form of worship. In each line, I see the open American road and the lonely churchgoer. “What keeps me yearning?” he asks. This book does. – Andrea Palpant Dilley, Christianity Today
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In this follow-up to his excellent debut collection, Joshua Robbins simultaneously expands the scope of his imagination and focuses his exacting attention on the deepest questions we face as moral actors in a broken world. Robbins has the courage to get angry with God; to confront Him, doubt Him, plead with Him; to lift our suffering toward His absent face. And he has the greater courage to let God respond in a voice that is by turns frustratingly distant, intimately critical, and violently beautiful, a voice embodied in the “grackle’s throaty ca-chings,” in a mural of the crucifixion on a cinder block wall, in “the way the setting sun sifts / its burdens down / through the horizon’s // Dusty exhalations / and onto the blocks / of vacant houses compliant in their rows / silent and searching / for heaven or stars.” This challenging and immensely quotable collection deserves courageous readers and rewards them with pleasures that go deep enough to hurt. – George David Clark, author of Newly Not Eternal and Editor-in-chief of 32 Poems
