Midsummer Count

“Robin Becker wonders within and across time for the stray phenomena of connection, crafting poems that make legible something vital but forgotten between us. Midsummer Count is a celebration of Becker’s extraordinary adeptness at drawing the unsung more dearly and clearly inside a sacred whole, and of her ongoing attunement to the daily mysteries that would bring us into greater communion with ourselves and with each other. Bless Robin Becker.” – Geffrey Davis, author of One Wild Word Away: Poems
“As ‘the whole wrecked world/slides into tomorrow,’ Robin Becker’s art seeks beauty but does not look away from its opposite. Becker’s poems use memorable figuration (compassion is a horse, lies are carpenter bees), painterly detail, and psychological insight, infused with the poet’s inimitable warmth and wit. Truths about women’s lives (Muriel Rukeyser’s plea) shine like silver in this book.” – Natasha Sajé, author of The Future Will Call You Something Else: Poems
“Robin Becker is one of our essential poets. She is a born storyteller, and in this legacy book she tells the story of her life, her heartbreaks along the way, increasing her heart-breaking powers. Yet her story does not end with her sorrows, for it is leavened by grace and love and the possibility of reaching beyond obstacles and fear to find, in life and in art, places of perfect affection.” – Wesley McNair, author of Late Wonders: New and Selected Poems
“Becker’s Midsummer Count: New and Selected Poems, traverses fifty years of feminist observation, depth, humor, and a very particular bold voice… She illuminates the small truths of our lives with clarity. For those who identify as feminist, lesbian, or Jew, Becker’s poetry is both validation and celebration.” – Ellen Miller-Mack * Sinister Wisdom *
“For decades, and certainly since her Lambda Literary Award-winning All-American Girl, Robin Becker has inspired and instructed us on how to be the portrait of the artist as a Jewish woman, a lesbian, a sister, a daughter, a lover, a traveler, and a teacher of the craft of poetry. With grace and grit, the poems that span her career now reside together in one volume to magnify their mastery and thematic conversations over time.” – Sandra Yannone, author of The Glass Studio

Robin Becker is the author of eight previous books of poetry, including The Black Bear Inside Me and the Lambda Award winner All-American Girl, both published in the Pitt Poetry Series. A liberal arts research professor emerita in English and women’s studies at the Pennsylvania State University, she lives in central Pennsylvania and southwestern New Hampshire.

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