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With calm abandon, Rob Schlegel stands among the genderless trees to shake notions of masculinity and fatherhood. Schlegel incorporates the visionary into everyday life, inhabiting patterns of relation that do not rely on easy categories. Working from the premise that poetry is indistinguishable from the life of the poet, Schlegel considers how his relationship to the creative process is forever changed when he becomes something new to someone else. 鈥淭he meaning I鈥檓 trying to protect is,鈥 Schlegel writes, 鈥渢he heart is neither boy, nor girl.鈥 In the Tree Where the Double Sex Sleeps is a tender search for the mother in the father, the poet in the parent, the forest in the human.
鈥淭his slim volume covers remarkable emotional terrain with perceptive insight into fatherhood and the inner workings of a poet鈥檚 associative thought process. It is rich and complex but utterly accessible, with lyrical lines that beg to be read aloud.鈥濃Publishers Weekly starred review
鈥淪chlegel鈥檚 poems, as tightly constructed as they are, have an openness about them that allows readers to imagine what identity could mean on a personal level, and how poetry, as a meditative and artful activity, can enact possibilities for transcendence.鈥濃The Literary Review
鈥淩ob Schlegel鈥檚 In the Tree Where the Double Sex Sleeps is dominated by three of the most remarkable long poems I鈥檝e read in years, but it is especially 鈥楴ovella鈥 that has grabbed me and won鈥檛 let me go. Schlegel writes with the easy lyric mastery he has demonstrated in each of his previous books. In the Tree Where the Double Sex Sleeps quietly elicits a great clamor of feeling.鈥濃擲hane McCrae, author and National Book Award finalist, In the Language of My Captor
鈥淧recise and nuanced, this lyric journey is at once fable, field guide, confession, and thrilling meditative adventure. I know of no poet quite so gifted as Rob Schlegel at chronicling the way 鈥榠mpulse turns over [the] mind.鈥欌濃擬ary Szybist, author and National Book Award winner, Incarnadine
鈥淩ob Schlegel has a voice you鈥檇 follow into the dark woods, knowing full well it鈥檚 hard, awful, daily, plain, living truth you鈥檙e running toward. The speaker in this book is a heartbreaker of a storyteller鈥攁 synesthesiac of mixed feelings, bad news, and wordsmithery. I feel known, caught out, believed in, vulnerable, when I read this book.鈥濃擝renda Shaughnessy, judge, 海角乱伦社区Poetry Prize