In Oh Oblivion, Robert Krut presents poems written from the island between lives. They look out on a world disappearing, filled with the surreality of a city where a cardboard box containing a human heart awaits discovery (“Nocturnal Cartography”) to a country where gasping birds cough up coins in a now-drained lake (“The Loons”). While current life is keenly observed, the poems turn to what lies ahead, investigating the narratives that are yet to take place, where simple earnest gestures linger (“An Offering Is Infinite”) and “the ghosts of the future” turn to the comfort a resetting solar system (“Oh Amnesia”). Standing in the space between worlds, the poems take a hard-earned stock of where we are but make a toast as we step forward on uncertain and unseen ground.
Robert Krut is also the author of Watch Me Trick Ghosts, The Now Dark Sun, Setting Us All on Fire (which received the Codhill Poetry Award), This is the Ocean, and The Spider Sermons. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Writing Program and College of Creative Studies, and lives in Los Angeles.
Paperback
Page count: 57
Trim size: 5.5 x 9 in.
ISBN: 978-1-949933-31-4