Probably the only thing you need to know about Michael Robbins is that he titled his debut collection The Second Sex, after Simone de Beauvoir, and he titled his second Alien vs. Predator after, well, you know. For a certain kind of reader, that’s enough of a recommendation to help them go out and buy the book right now—go ahead! Walkman is for you. Other readers know what’s coming and are already closing this tab in their web browser. Then there are yet others who don’t know who Robbins is or what he’s about. I’ll speak to those readers. Probably the best way I can put it is that Michael Robbins has made it his business to straddle the line between two communities of poets: the straight-laced MFA graduates and the notes-app reading Insta-poets. He wants to be both and doesn’t see one as being above the other. Walkman is his latest effort here. You might start to realize what Robbins is up to when, in a poem titled “Throwing the Yijing in Bullhead City,” he writes:

                                    I hate
titles like “Throwing the Yijing in
Bullhead city.”

By focusing on some of Robbins’ rhetorical tricks, I risk making him sound insufferable or obsessed with playing tricks on his audience—and I think it does take a certain kind of reader to appreciate this sort of quasi-confessional, post-ironic posturing. Some of Robbins’ earlier poems, in Alien vs. Predator especially, are really built around that kind of flourish. But in Walkman, I found that Robbins’ ironic distance was a roundabout way of disarming the reader and allowing an incredibly potent voice to shine through.

This voice carries the collection. Walkman is full of long poems—it’s not that Robbins has a lot to say (part of the point of naming your poetry collection after a branded entertainment device is to actually try and say less), but rather that Robbins has figured out how to turn an internal monologue into an internal dialogue:

                        in those days
I wrote the worst poems ever.
“I held a guitar and trembled
and would not sing” is an actual
line I wrote!

I suspect that Robbins isn’t going to speak to every reader, and I suspect that he would be just fine with that. If you think you’re up to the task, Walkman is a collection that’s ready to address the events of the past year without feeling rooted in that time or place. You’ll be able to come back to the collection in a decade, partly because the poems happen on a personal scale and won’t age as poorly as directly political poems, but also because Robbins’ oblique angle on our compounding crisis is both less urgent and more poignant. What was the last song you listened to on your Sony Walkman? Were you born in time to own one? Robbins has found a few quiet moments where past and future meet and is asking us to join him there.