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Michael Robbins

Alien vs. Predator (Penguin Poets) Paperback – March 27, 2012

by Michael Robbins (Author)

4.2 37 ratings

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

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WINNER OF THE BELIEVER'S READER SURVEY, BEST BOOK OF POETRY*SELECTED AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR:
The New York Times * Slate * The New York Observer * Commonweal * Books & Culture * Vol. 1 Brooklyn * Complex * The Millions * The Australian

The debut collection of a poet whose savage, hilarious work has already received extraordinary notice.
Since his poems first began to appear in the pages of The New Yorker and Poetry, there has been a lot of excited talk about the fresh and inventive work of Michael Robbins. Equal parts hip- hop, John Berryman, and capitalism seeking death and not finding it, Robbins's poems are strange, wonderful, wild, and completely unlike anything else being written today. As allusive as the Cantos, as aggressive as a circular saw, this debut collection will offend none but the virtuous.

"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
"You don't get the instant satisfaction you might expect from a poet hungrily stalking the moment; Robbins's poems have their own distinctly contemporary appeal: They slowly develop into embarrassing pictures of ourselves. They aren't just shiny and fun, they're also sharp -- which makes them quite dangerous."--The Boston Globe

"The first important poet whose work can be appreciated only with an Internet connection, Robbins is a lot more than the first 'Google poet.' He is also a significant new poetic voice and, quite possibly, a living poet with a chance of developing a genuine popular following."--The Weekly Standard

"If later John Ashbery and David McGimpsey have proven that capitalist popular culture is a suitable subject for poetry, Robbins goes a step further and attempts its formal mimesis. And he does it really goddamn well."--The National Post

Print length

96 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Books
Publication date

March 27, 2012
Dimensions

5.6 x 0.3 x 8.3 inches
ISBN-10

0143120352
ISBN-13

978-0143120353
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Mr. Robbins's heart is not lovely but beating a bit arrhythmically; notdark but lighted by a dangling disco ball; not deep but as shallow andalert as a tidal buoy facing down a tsunami. Yet it's a heart crammedfull, like a goose's liver, with pagan grace. This man can write.... 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

"It's in his rhymes -- polysyllabic, serial, audacious -- that Robbins most resembles an M.C., and most distinguishes himself from other poets. He seems at least as interested in arranging sequences of identical vowel sounds as he is in getting consonants to agree. When he pairs 'Beckett' with 'cricket,' he sounds like Paul Muldoon, but when he rhymes 'Parkinson's,' 'Arkansas,' and 'dark clicks on,' he's channeling Jay-Z." -- The New York Times Book Review

"Robbins is abrupt, conversational, surreal, and sarcastic - a wiseguy with vulnerability. Many of his poems end on a note of sadness or despair in a way that suggests what preceded it was an attempt by the speaker to put on a brave front, to man up or gut it out. But it's a measure of how well-crafted Robbins' poems are that he does a good job of conveying just what's a put-on and what's meant to be taken seriously." -- Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

"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

From the Back Cover

"These poems are viciously inventive. Faster than you can rhyme stegosaur/megastore, Robbins code-switches between the English Canon and Top Forty: Nirvana and Blake, The Clash and Yeats, creating a political and social commentary that will make the hair stand on your head." -- Ange Mlinko

"You may notice the cultural references first -- Guns N' Roses, Eric B. & Rakim, Fleetwood Mac, M*A*S*H, Star Wars -- and be tempted to tie Robbins to these anchors. But there are as many contemporary references in Eliot and Pound and Horace as there are in Robbins: carbon-dating isn't what distinguishes these poems. Robbins works in traditional and nontraditional forms that pivot on the beat, which he turns around, seamlessly and ruthlessly. The thread here is a long-distance conversation crammed into the available enjambment, as charged as the pop songs that play beneath the words." -- Sasha Frere-Jones

"From the wild mixture of pop-culture and the English poetic tradition arises the voice -- brave, direct, brilliant, arrogant, unforgettable voice -- of a poet whom Catullus would recognize, whom Mayakovsky would welcome. This is a poetics that whips up the tradition and lashes 'a slap in the face of public taste.' Robbins is unafraid to bring back vulgarity -- that saving, generous, musical vulgarity which abruptly awakens us from our longish sleep-time in America. Yes, Michael Robbins is a rascal. The sort of rascal Francois Villon used to be. He takes no prisoners. His music is brutal -- and also intricate, rigorous, unpredictable. Mothers of America! let your kids read some of this wild, brave, real verse." -- Ilya Kaminsky

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; 0 edition (March 27, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 96 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0143120352
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143120353
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.6 x 0.3 x 8.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,014,692 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #920 in Poetry Literary Criticism (Books)
- #3,975 in Literary Criticism & Theory
- #9,887 in Short Stories Anthologies

Customer Reviews:
4.2 37 ratings

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4.2 out of 5

37 global ratings

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Norma S. Hass

More Fun than a Barrel of Nuncle's Flunkies

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 17, 2013

Verified Purchase

Buy this book. Better yet, buy two copies of Michael Robbins' "Alien vs. Predator",
one to keep nice, and one to write your decodings, comments, notes and poems of your own.

Met a fork to poke the hounds
Pizzling on a burning oak.
Money makes the word go round--
Elephants cant take a joke.
Upper brachs never lack
Paradigms worth 20 scents.
Fallen sparrows pay no rent.
Elephants drop their pants,
Showing off pee Nile implants.
Money makes the birds go down.

Like that? Robbins did not write it. I did--a parody. Don't get mad, Mr. Robbins. Usually poets have to be dead, or at least old, to get parodied. If you like it,Reader,you'll love Robbins.

Michael Robbins is an allusionist. He pulls white Babbitts out of a red hat society meeting and dyes them blue. He takes snippits of everything from Bible references, schoolyard taunts, movies, rock bands,and shakes them, bakes them, breaks them up and glues them back together. Not haphazardly, mind you, but in a way that reveals new meaning. Take the cliche rebuke to a rude-seeming person, "Were you born in a barn?" In his "My Old Job" (page 9) Robbins calls on the reader to think, "Who was born in a barn--or manger?" His Learn'd Astronomer( page 31) finds love to be less than a Crackerjack prize.

Unless you've read the same books, listened to the same bands, bought the same products as Mr. Robbins has, you will find his collages of allusions to be puzzle-poems. They require decoding.

"A poem should not mean but be"
Excuses my obscurity.
No way.

There is help. There is Google. There is your friendly neighborhood librarian.
When somebody writes a 600-page puzzle-novel and tells me I have to spend my life decoding it, I tell him to peddle his papers elsewhere. But Mr. Robbins' poems are short, and puzzles can be fun. After you've solved them, you find that the poems are not funny. They deal with life's disappointments and disillusions.

Poetic technogeeks will find Mr. R. knows his stuff. He favors trochaic tetrameter with half a foot cut off. He uses slant rhyme and assonance. He hides his rhyme in the middle of a line from time to time, so try reading him aloud. His irregularities make his poems harder to memorise. Too bad.

I never heard of Michael Robbins until I read his article in the Chicago Tribune's literary supplement Printers Row, (September 8, 2013, pp. 6-7,) "Where comptency ends, poetry begins". (Yes, that's how Printers [no apostrophe] Row uncapitalizes it.)
Mr. R has no patience with poets who write in High Falute and scorn pop culture references. I wonder about poets reviewing other poets. If the reviewee is not a good as the reviewer, there's schadenfreude; if the reviewee is better, there's green poison in the reviewer's lime Jello.

3 people found this helpful

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Ferd Nerfus

A Vesuvius of Love For You

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 20, 2013

Verified Purchase

Fun in the sun is better than fights every night. While science fiction poetry is sometimes rare these days, fictional poetry science is on a rampage. This is why I recommend Michael Robbins's often hilarious, "fontly incorrect" collection of what the glitterati collectively seem to know without any desire to admit it. The skewed takes on various poetic grates and ingrates of history runs askew of the unconventionally conventional wisdom of the mass of poetry ticks hopping across the Atlantic like fleas on the backside of a terribly angry dog. Clearly surreal in intent, Robbins smokes some of the best dopes in American history in a parodied honorarium of the goldfish swimming in the aquarium of civilized humankind.

Honestly, this is better than Stevie Nicks singing "Gold Dust Woman" and telling the welty old whelps of puppy-dog poetics how to monkey-wrench the entire Modern Language Association in a single puff of breath--something does when the Robbins gets to honking in the middle of a snowstorm.

Also excellent for young men and women "confusillated" by subjective phenomenology misapplied to civilization while separating objects from the subjects in a politicized sense of classification without the necessity of classism.

Please untangle my mind.

2 people found this helpful

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Andrew Wright

Absolutely Phenomenal

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 15, 2017

Verified Purchase

I did a report on this book for my Advanced Poetry Writing class and it was honestly such an utter delight that I'd look forward to chewing on nasty cafeteria food as long as I had some insane, beyond witty poems to read out of this book. You sort of know what you're getting into, but Robbins still totally subverts expectations in all of the most delightful and even shocking ways. An absolute master wordsmith unafraid to do new, incredible things with modern words.

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K. S. Marchetto

Self-Important Nonsense

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 21, 2013

Verified Purchase

I am fully aware that I am one of the only critics of contemporary poetry who feel this way about Michael Robbins, but: I. Hate. This. Book.

First of all, Robbins as a person is abrasive, unkind, and frankly downright rude. He doesn't care about that, either--his opinion is that if you think he's a jerk, you're an idiot. (Watch any interview with him anywhere online, or check out his Twitter. So rude.)

Secondly, this book shows obvious lyrical prowess. His scansion and rhyming are pristine, his knowledge of classical works and writers is evident, and the presence of classical forms is marked.

Thirdly, he puts that knowledge and ability to horrible use. The poems are trite and pathetic. A thorough investment in pop culture doesn't automatically make one a smart person; in fact, quite the opposite--too much pop culture and not enough thinking (of which--invested thought--the poems are entirely devoid) makes one a perfect idiot. Any vapid teenager can rattle off a string of pop culture icons, and thus I am saying that any vapid teenager could write the bulk of these poems.

This book is a waste of cultural space.

25 people found this helpful

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Charles Jones

Weird!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 21, 2015

Verified Purchase

I'm still not sure what is going on with this poetry, but I really like it. There were a lot of references I caught to things like classic rock songs, and I'm sure I missed twice what I caught. I would recommend this to anyone who likes clever wordplay and fresh rhyming techniques. Definitely not a self-serious book.

Helpful

Al

"Old pond, frog jumps in, so what."

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 26, 2016

Verified Purchase

For centuries nature has inspired poets, but what happens when nature gets bulldozed, paved over and replaced by advertising? You get this.

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Tufnell Paul

Mad, Bad and Dangerous

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 10, 2016

Verified Purchase

This is exactly what modern poetry should be. If like me you struggle with poetry that is full of the well chosen metaphor, references the classics and dealing delicately with your feelings, then try this. Wilfully pretentious, angrily demented and overflowing with allusions to rock lyrics you only half remember.
It’s not so much the new rock ‘n’ roll; more it takes the dead body of rock ‘n’ roll and shakes the bejesus out of it, trying to rattle the last dregs of life from it. Squeezing out the sparks. Read it too fast and you’ll get a nosebleed. Read it slowly and you can only laugh at the red-blooded absurdity of it.
If your idea of fun is chipping the new Banksy off the wall of your local supermarket car park, then this is the poetry for you. Anarchism in a teacup. Postmodernist consumerism. Consumerist postmodernism eating itself itself in a self-regarding whirlpool of its own cleverness.
Don’t hesitate. Buy yourself a copy. Read it on the bog. Shout it out loud at your girl and at your dog. Laugh. Throw it away. Then repeat.

One person found this helpful

SterlingArcher

Long delivery time. Excellent conditions.

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on November 4, 2015

Verified Purchase

Received in excellent condition. As good as new. The pages are not dog-eared or torn. I would prefer to buy from this selle again. Wish the delivery was a tadbit early but I am happy anyway.

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