Revenge

Lauri Robertson's Revenge cuts to the core of strife between libido and aggression. As a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst she asks in the preface, "In all seriousness, what does one do with rage..?" It's a painful question for our time, or all time. With intimate wit and wisdom she surveys, if not integrates, the vast landscape of internal conflict.

  Elise W. Snyder, MD

Lauri Robertson titles her book Revenge, and she does take on some unpleasant incidents that require responses in these poems; but ultimately the words she chooses are existential, aware of time passing and death around the corner. So why hold rancors? Why seek revenge? With a clear and easy diction she invites sensitive and thoughtful readers to answer. It is refreshing to read poems like water in a stream, to see your reflection, to understand one's common humanity and one's desire for redress.

  Indran Amirthanayagam, author of The Runner's Almanac

In Revenge, Lauri Robertson's biting 6th volume of poetry, a woman becomes so angry that she throws a piece of plastic into the regular garbage instead of the recycling. But, it's not all a revenge-lite catalogue; note the Girl Scouts accidentally or otherwise leaving her out of the troop because her mother was in a psychiatric hospital. The vignettes resonate deeply, and remind the reader of their own stories. Robertson, who happens to be a psychoanalyst, makes unvarnished, dumbfounded inquiry into our nature(s). This is not appalling, worldly revenge, though perhaps some kind of understanding begins here.

  Susan Lewis Duffy

Robertson's new poetry volume employs intimate and personal language to confront humanity with the courage and tenderness of a psychoanalyst. She wonders "what does one do with rage and aggression?" While looking for answers her incisive observations reveal a fragile and imperfect life, a life with blemishes. There are encounters with people who represent states of the heart, of the mind, even bureaucrats, housekeepers, or bus drivers. Those encounters reveal an aching vulnerability, "a world in so much pain." She writes: "You may not know the true / depth of the wound / until your scalpel / explores it." But deliverance can only arise from understanding, and the poems' luminosity brings us forth triumphantly. Robertson has written the book we all want to write but don't dare.

  Jorge Armenteros, author of The Curvature of An Absence