Rob Schlegel's poems have appeared in Boston Review, Handsome, Octopus, VOLT and elsewhere.
"In The Lesser Fields, Rob Schlegel takes a lit match to the
surfaces of his words in an act of poetic arson. Thus the poet
wanders a landscape whose commonplace markers-fish, sea, trees,
birds-are made disquietingly strange: "Before my mind / Can shape
it, presence / Finishes a thought in my fingers." The natural world
of language manifests with an incendiary beauty at once tender and
dangerous, reckless and precise. This poetry burns subtly, but the
heat is unmistakable."
--Elizabeth Robinson
"Rob Schlegel has a mind of winter. Like the painter Morandi,
Schlegel makes a world of absence and deprivation-our world, the
world of human mortality-feel like plenitude. Imagine wanting to
discover the place where you yourself 'have not yet happened.' Now
imagine creating this place in a language of hard-won precision-a
diction and syntax so elegantly austere that the smallest gesture
becomes an explosion of possibility. The result is a book that
feels rivetingly contemporary while resembling nothing else, a book
that seems shockingly intimate while giving nothing away. The
Lesser Fields is a guide-book to the world we've always known but
never truly seen."
--James Longenbach, final judge
"Schlegel's debut, winner of the 2009 Colorado Prize for Poetry,
presents a stark, haunted landscape, as expansive as it is lonesome
and yet quietly inviting. It's a world where the mind projects its
solitude onto nature while nature returns the favor. 'Here and not
here, ' says Schlegel, 'I breath away/ the parts of myself I no
longer require. /A lost lover knits with the natural world after
death (Tonight, her name is a leaf covering/ my left eye. The right
I close/ for the wind to stitch shut with thread/ from the dress
she wore into the grave/ where the determined roots of the tree/
are making a braid around her body);/ elsewhere another lover is
able to /fill the bath with everything that has/ Or could ever
happen between us, / imbuing everyday domestic tasks like bathing
with symbolic portent in language both straightforward and
seductive. A series of haiku-like /November Deaths ekes out little
truths (/But for the tip of land/ At which the vessel is aimed/
There is nothing to steady its course/) and another series of Lives
asks, in various ways, /Toward what am I drawn?/ Answers are
everywhere in this promising first book."
--Publisher's Weekly
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