The New York Times - Dwight Garner
"My heart is lovely, dark and deep," Michael Robbins writes in a poem called "Plastic Robbins Band" in Alien vs. Predator, his first collection. He's lying, shamelessly. Based on these buzzing, flyspecked, fluorescent poems, I'd guess that Mr. Robbins's heart is not lovely but beating a bit arrhythmically; not dark but lighted by a dangling disco ball; not deep but as shallow and alert as a tidal buoy facing down a tsunami. Yet it's a heart crammed full, like a goose's liver, with pagan grace. This man can write.
The Washington Post - Elizabeth Lund
Michael Robbins's writing is as edgy and brash as the sci-fi characters he gives voice to in his first collection…In poems that range from outrageous to vulgar and throb with energy, he boldly employs cliches, literary allusions and cultural references…
The New York Times Book Review
Robbins is one part Ashbery and two parts Tupac…It's in his rhymes—polysyllabic, serial, audacious—that Robbins most resembles an M.C., and most distinguishes himself from other poets…This is a pretty relentless debut, but there are worse things to be than relentlessly funny…
Publishers Weekly
The poems in this debut are formally exact: etched into scrupulous quatrains and quintets, prosodically meticulous, exasperatingly well-rhymed (“Rorschach blots,” for example, is coupled with “Arnold Horshack thoughts”). Yet what makes this collection distinct is a convulsive, almost frenzied use of cultural reference, with vamps on Adorno, Rilke, Berryman, and Wittgenstein, among others. More often, the poems cite pop songs, film dialogue (“Dude, this aggression will not stand” from The Big Lebowski), and American folk culture (“My name is Michael, I’m an alcoholic./Hi, Michael. Row your boat ashore”). Yet this is more than simple allusion. Robbins’s ear is tuned to the caffeinated jabber of digital culture, with its endlessly clickable, synaptic links; the flotsam of poems, megastore names, and childhood rhymes get battered about, and the original language re-emerges transformed. Santa urging his reindeer becomes a call to heavy metal bands: “On Sabbath, on Slayer, on Maiden and Venom!” Robert Frost is unceremoniously pantsed: “I give my skinny prick / a shake, to ask if there is some mistake.” In a clever moment perhaps serving as Robbins’s ars poetica, Auden gets inverted: “Nothing makes poetry happen.” (Apr.)
