“In Eschatology in Crayon Wax, Robbins achieves a miraculous balance between doubt, hope, and despair. These are poems that desperately want to praise, but never at the price of dishonesty. The beauty that we witness here survives in a suffering world—and is more compelling for it. Easily one of the best books I’ve read this year.”
—Michael Shewmaker, author of Leviathan
“Joshua Robbins’s new book is a collection of modern psalms of pain and pleading, making doubt a form of worship. In each line, I see the open American road and the lonely churchgoer. ‘What keeps me yearning?’ he asks. This book does.”
—Andrea Palpant Dilley, Christianity Today
“In this follow-up to his excellent debut collection, Joshua Robbins simultaneously expands the scope of his imagination and focuses his exacting attention on the deepest questions we face as moral actors in a broken world. Robbins has the courage to get angry with God; to confront Him, doubt Him, plead with Him; to lift our suffering toward His absent face. And he has the greater courage to let God respond in a voice that is by turns frustratingly distant, intimately critical, and violently beautiful, a voice embodied in the ‘grackle’s throaty ca-chings,’ in a mural of the crucifixion on a cinder block wall, in ‘the way the setting sun sifts / its burdens down / through the horizon’s // Dusty exhalations / and onto the blocks / of vacant houses compliant in their rows / silent and searching / for heaven or stars.’ This challenging and immensely quotable collection deserves courageous readers and rewards them with pleasures that go deep enough to hurt.”
—George David Clark, author of Newly Not Eternal and Editor-in-chief of 32 Poems
“Robbins’s Eschatology in Crayon Wax vacillates between prayer, psalm, and song, creating a gorgeous lyric middle-ground that complicates those very forms and our existence within them. Through conversations between an ‘I’ and God-figure, these poems probe into the very core of human relationships, asking how to keep reaching and surviving in the face of suffering. ‘Listen,’ these poems insist, ‘I’m afraid there is / no other world / I’m afraid this will never be enough.’ Yet, despite this, or perhaps because of it, Robbins reminds us to keep singing and listening. This is a book you will want to hum to yourself in private and read aloud to let its music lift off the page in chorus. It is a book as much about our individual spirituality as it is about our shared humanity. It is a transcendent read.”
—Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, author of 40 Weeks.
“With a forgiving spirit, unrelenting, patient eye, and deft lyricism, the poems in Joshua Robbins’s Eschatology in Crayon Wax render our damaged yet redeemable landscape, and the big sky of their author's heart. Claiming innocence as its baseline, these poems probe our individual destinies as well as our species’ and our planet’s with ingenious skill. The poems’ varied tonalities allow for hope, anger, and resignation to interrogate each other in cascading layers of drama and revelation. This is beautiful, hard earned poetry, a finely crafted gift that I will long treasure.”
—Khaled Mattawa, author of Fugitive Atlas
