Stepping into the world of Praise Nothing is like getting lost in a forsaken prairie of violence, AM gospel radio, 1950s R&B, strip mall laundromats, trailer parks and truck stops. Joshua Robbins is foremost a storyteller, working in a formal but simultaneously colloquial style, with many poems structured in the traditional tercet stanzas of Dante, yet peppered with diverse pop figures like Buddy Holly and Janis Joplin and small-town entertainments like drinking where "empty tallboys glint" and "hotboxing" in a "junk-crammed singlewide." In their search for meaning, his narrators confront their own failures in a landscape of "jerry-rigged claptrap/ where cracked curb/ and razor gravel crosshatch" and "a midnight trucker's jake-braking/ detonates sound-wall concrete."
Robbins doesn't shrink from the bleak emptiness he finds around him. In their country ways, his characters keep searching, even if only to learn that "no bottle's/ peeled-back label will ever/ reveal anything other than darkened/ glass." Sometimes, however, like the narrator in "Theodicy," they recognize that "if God is with us,/ then maybe He lives around here, too,/ some duplex on a loop or a single/ apartment with a satellite dish... or maybe/ He's just driving, His window cracked/ to feel the cold as the sun descends." That's not a bad image with which to remember this fine first collection of poems. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.