Ridiculous Light
Valencia Robin

2018 Lexi Rudnisky First Book Prize Winner

Finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award

In Ridiculous Light, Valencia Robin captures the everyday and the ecstatic in a voice all her own. Through poems that live at the intersection of history and experience, she captures the joys and tumult of being alive. She is a storyteller of the first order, a documenter not just of memories but of how we remember.

“In these memorable poems, Valencia Robin serves up a brash, blistering narrative that is impossible to turn away from. . . . Ridiculous Light illuminates in utterly lyrical and necessary ways.”
—Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art

“In Ridiculous Light, Valencia Robin transforms memories of family, Milwaukee, and her post-divorce reckoning into poetry that underscores the lyric's distinctive power to illuminate the contours of a Black woman’s life.”
—John Keene, author of Counternarratives

Valencia Robin is a poet and visual artist. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Emily Clark Balch Award and the Hocking Hills Power of Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Boston Review, Poetry Daily and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia and an MFA in Art & Design from the University of Michigan.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-496-6 / 56 pages / Poetry