To My Dreamcatcher

Elizabeth Robin's first full-length collection, To My Dreamcatcher travels through her past in the title poem, an elegy to her late husband. There, she moves from margins to the page's middle, and finds a comfortable place in which to tell her story. Within such spaces, Robin tackles the challenge: as a woman alone, finishing life well. As a poet of witness and discovery, Robin cannot resist raising up the stories of those pushed into the margins. To My Dreamcatcher starts in the world of workers, kittens, the isolated and starving, and travels from this bleakness into a place of joy and possibility, a place where we learn the lessons of trees and clouds and moons and the sound of water. Tiana Clark connects Mary Ruefle's, "moon, the very embodiment of lyric poetry" to a "lunar lyricism" reflected by Elizabeth Robin. Clark says, "The language is mystical, mythic, sublime, and romantic. The haunting imagery is fresh and allows for strangeness, devastation, and delight in a way that captures me as a reader. There's a cohesive arc in her poems; these stunning poems all felt like 'a rumbling love song' and left me lit up and wanting more."