THOUGHT BALLOON
by Kit Robinson
Roof Books is proud to present Kit Robinson’s Thought Balloon as part of his continuing experiment with what’s occurring for him right now while he’s writing. “Time is scenes. / Cut the deck / And lay the cards down one by one.” Yet Thought Balloon is not shoot-from-the-hip writing. The thoroughness of Robinson’s investigation of the moment produces countless themes and times, multiple scales and languages, frequent among the common speech of a west coast bard in his prime thinking back to Pleistocene predators...
And forward to climate change since “Everyday life is the climate change of introspection.” How the writer’s pen moves with this species of writing that Robinson has opened to the reader implies a politics and an ecology of mind: “A basketball / is made of rubber / from Peru” reappears as “The people united will never be defeated / Unless we sell ourselves into slavery / To the lowest bidder…” We can go anywhere with this method so you the reader decide on your itinerary. This is the kind of freedom promised by improvisation, and here Robinson delivers; you’re gonna like reading this book.
“Kit Robinson, always an observer of thoughts (not their manager), an instrumentalist of say-abilities (not the guarantor of their authenticity), has masterfully minted another fresh collection of poetry. Dedicated admirers, as well as those new to his artistry, will delight in engaging works that are clear of ideological pre-saturation. What we get here is a crisp cool California sober morning whereby the midday matrices of social conditioning become momentarily audible, susceptible to flow, thus transposable towards freedoms as yet undiscovered. Mist cleared by steady sunlight. What follows, follows.”
– Rodrigo Toscano
“A favorite tree in the nearby Botanical Gardens is a comely sycamore planted there in the 1970s with seeds that had been to the moon and back on one of the Apollo flights. Looking up at its sunlit crown today I think of Kit Robinson’s poems, nearly half a century of them, made as they are of words widely travelled in historical and semantic realms—words that returned to earth subtly altered, tinged with the sweet Wine of No Design, the super lexical and the ur-grammatical twining and glowing as one in a sort of lovely tropotaxis.”
– Merrill Gilfillan
“The idea goes in one way, comes out another. Sneaks in on an unassuming line shot through with humor, elegant slang, grief. ‘The sky is how deep.’ Landscape as consolation. City as word-play. World as warning to you, dear reader, safe at home in your comfortable, time-traveler mind.”
– Claudia La Rocco
Kit Robinson was born in Evanston, Illinois, grew up in Cincinnati, went to Yale, and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area ever since. He is the author of Leaves of Class, Marine Layer, A Mammal of Style (with Ted Greenwald), Determination, The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems, 1976-2003, and more than 20 other books of poetry.