Upon its publication in 2012, Alien vs. Predator, the debut collection by Michael Robbins, became one of the most celebrated works of poetry in the country, winning acclaim for its startling freshness and originality.
Robbins’s poems are irrationally exuberant, ‘brainily dic ing
high and low culture …with wit and pagan grace’
(The New York Times). The thirty-six new poems in The Second Sex carry over the music, attitude, hilarity, and vulgarity of Alien vs. Predator, while also working deeper autobiographical and political veins.
Praise for Alien vs. Predator Selected as a best book of the year by- The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Slate The New York Observer, Commonweal, The Millions
‘Robbins’s poetry is quick as thought, as Constance Rourke might have put it … It might be more true to say Robbins’s poetry is thought, or rather a mind alive but not thinking at all, a jumble of memory and stimuli and distractions and it’s-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue, never mind, a roaring in the head of someone talking to someone else while what he’s really doing is talking to himself, but barely listening, and having the time of his life.’
Greil Marcus, The Believer
‘This man is not here to improve us.
He’s here to turn us on.
This is a linguistic booty call … What puts his poems over is their sheer joy and dizzy command … Reading Mr. Robbins’s best stuff makes you feel something new is being flogged into existence … He has a sky-blue originality of utterance.’
Dwight Garner, The New York Times
‘Every once in a while, a book appears as if out of nowhere, uncanny in its authority, combining the shock of the new with the shock of recognition.
Michael Robbins’s Alien vs. Predator has given me a sense of what early readers of 'The Waste Land’ must have felt in 1922, what it must have been like to pick up a copy of Wise Blood at the bookstore in 1952.‘
John Wilson, Commonweal
