As restless, reckless, and precise as the Colt revolver for which it is named, Robyn Schiff鈥檚 Revolver 鈥渞epeats fire without reloading鈥 as it reckons with the array of foreboding objects displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the traces of their ghosts one hundred years later.
A dirge on the Singer Sewing Machine, an exuberant and unnerving rumination on multipurpose campaign furniture, and a breathless account of Ralph Lauren鈥檚 silver Porsche 550 Spyder are among the collection鈥檚 exhilarating corporate histories, urgent fantasias, and agonizing love poems. The long, lavish, and utterly unpredictable sentences that Schiff has assembled contort as much to discover what can鈥檛 be contained as what can.
This is a book of extremes relentlessly contemporary in scope. And like the eighty-blade sportsman鈥檚 knife also described here, Revolver keeps opening and reopening to the daunting possibilities of transformation鈥斺淪played it is a bouquet of all the ways a point mutates.鈥
"This book springs from an imagination and vocabulary so surprising and intriguing that, in many poems, every line is a revelation."鈥Publisher's Weekly
鈥淲ild with imagination, unafraid, ambitious, inventive, stitched to perfection by a formal genius that recalls the quirkily perfect forms (and tones) of Marianne Moore, Revolver is a perpetual motion machine in which time, history, matter, and a profound tenderness for the made world knot, rush, pleat, unfurl.... What an embroidery, what a flawless understanding of gravity. There is not a poem in this collection that does not amaze. As with Worth鈥攁nd worthy of being its successor鈥攖his is a work of profound daring, written by a spirit deeply aware of the ultimate cost of beauty, and the endless human thirst for, and dependence upon, surfaces鈥攈istorical, lyric, material, and emotional.鈥濃擩orie Graham
"I love that it is impossible to predict the paths of the poems in Revolver. Schiff鈥檚 footwork is utterly unfamiliar in its combinations鈥攃urtsey, kick, pirouette. Rabbit hole, revolving door, detour. Facts (from the tiny sugar pistols on Elizabeth Colt鈥檚 cake to the Chinese name for Asian Longhorned Beetles) have never been so faceted, so fantastic. And these details are matched鈥攊f not surpassed鈥攂y a ferocity of feeling, '鈥ho would not kiss the head of a swan / just to try to memorize / the softness of something wild?'"鈥擬atthea Harvey
From 鈥淪ilverware by J. A. Henckels鈥
Let me be as streamlined as my knife when I say this.
As cold as my three-pronged fork that
cools the meat even as it steadies it.
A pettiness in me was honed
in this cutlers鈥 town, later bombed,
in which Adolf Eichmann, who was born there
alongside my wedding pattern, could hear
the constant sharpening of knives
like some children hear the corn in their hometowns
talking to them through the wind.
The horizon is just the score they breathe through
like a box of chickens
breathing through a slit.
