Review
"... Apprehend amplifies the body of her previous work, examining the insurgence, regulation, and ambiguity of eros through a brilliant re-reading of classic fairy tales. Fairy tales, Robinson suggests, act like a subspecies of theology; their disturbing and uncanny motifs appeal to our secret longing for solace and disruption. In the space between them we might apprehend, for a moment, the possibility of standing outside the gaze of history.... ...Throughout these poems the other approaches like a monster, or a wolf, or a witch, to stand in a radical proximity. Nearness hurts these poems like a heartbreak of continuous affirmation. This is the source of their uncanniness, the way they touch us to the quick, like a ghost with its nerves on fire and speaking the shadow tongue we know as our own hidden murmur. We are lost, we are found, then lost again, but we are never who we were before. Inside the story we make a way for ourselves, lighting a home, preparing its meals, dreaming the dream of shelter and exposure. Robinson's wisdom is to acknowledge that we ask of the poem, as of the fairy tale, to affirm for us that though the world is broken, we are somehow safe inside of it."--Patrick Pritchett, The Rain Taxi Review of Books, Volume 8 Number 3
Review
"Taking her cues from folktale, legend, and fable, Elizabeth Robinson has reinvented the 'uses of enchantment.' Robinson calibrates the motion between fear, apprehension, and knowledge--comprehension at the crux of human imagining. She shows, with a minimalist's precision and a logician's attention to linguistic morphology, how the often bleak agenda of the real capitulates to the moral restitution of the true; how our need to tell stories enjambs faith and enlightenment. This is a work of uncanny persuasion." (Ann Lauterbach )
