Description
This is what comes of taking dreams / off the horizon. It is the sun / or nothing else, you would scream / if you weren’t caught up in the chorus.
Leaning deliberately on the imagined while scrutinizing reality and hoping for the as-yet-unseen, UNMET is a poetry collection that explores themes of frustration, justice, and thwarted rescue from a perspective that is Black-Latinx, Canadian, immigrant, and female. Drawing on a wide range of poetics, from Wallace Stevens to Tony Hoagland and Diane Seuss, roberts’s musically-driven narrative surrealism confronts such timely issues as police brutality, respectability politics, intimate partner, and ecological crisis, and considers the might-have-been alongside the what could be, negotiating the past without losing hope for the future.
Praise for rushes from the river of disappointment
“roberts speaks with clarity and certainty, in a firm and haunting voice. This is an author clearly driven by a need to articulate what is missed. She is unafraid to end a poem abruptly and to let the quiet that follows do some of the speaking. She’s also clearly having fun—with physics, with form, with the second grammar of the line break, and with memories joyous and shocking and neither and both.”
—Quebec Writers’ Federation A.M. Klein Award jury
“This collection enchanted me—smart, thoughtful, inventive, unafraid, poignant, and engaging, these poems are spot on. How lucky are we in this heartbreaking world to have roberts’ compelling voice of beauty, humor, and depth allowing us to dip our toes in this exquisite river of poems.”
—Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Hourglass Museum
“A moving and poignant book of poetry, in which roberts exhibits tremendous range in both form and tone. Easily one of the finest poetry titles out this spring.”
—Annick MacAskill, author Murmurations
“A sweeping force of music, pulsing images, clear wit, and tenderness. Within beautifully formed poems, there is extensive consideration of what we can understand about love and grief alongside faith and ‘unbelief’ over time.”
—Montreal Review of Books
