Overview

Poems from the halls of shelters, courthouses, and soup kitchens During Elizabeth Robinson's six years working with chronically unhoused people in Boulder, Colorado, her relationships with the community's most vulnerable deepened - even as they were filtered through a web of paperwork, systems, and strictures. The Vulnerability Index questionnaire is just one such system. Ubiquitous in shelters across America, it is representative of the endless tasks that people living on the street must complete to receive even minor assistance. Moving between the local court, jail, shelter, and soup kitchen, Robinson's poems capture the strange juxtapositions of the intimate, bureaucratic, and absurd that such spaces demand: a frostbite victim wants to share his state-sponsored recovery room with a friend from the street, a domestic violence survivor must change her name and even her social security number, an unhoused activist joins a vigil for another woman only to discover that she is, mistakenly, the person being mourned. Spare yet richly empathetic, Robinson’ s verse works to implicate the reader's own vulnerability on every page.

Full Product Details

9780810149205

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Elizabeth Robinson is one of America's most vibrant experimental poets. Vulnerability Index is provocatively present in twenty-first century America, movingly lived in its observations, vulnerabilities and commitments, and profoundly intersectional in its empathies with the diverse populations who find themselves unhoused in America."" - Matthew Cooperman, author of the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless

Author Information

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of several collections of poetry, including Pure Descent, the National Poetry Series winner, Apprehend, winner of the Fence Modern Poets Prize, and On Ghosts, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available