This collection of poems by Elizabeth Robinson circles around and around the place of the individual in relation to an other or Other or others. If human experience is nested in relation, “the braid of bodies that engendered this self,” it is also disrupted by “an intimacy that can disassemble and recreate itself” until an uneasy form of empathy emerges from the radical isolation of human introspection:
“I would be you, the self at a loss. The invisible hand that rests on the shoulder
“of its own body, guiding it. We do not know what comfort is.”
Using prose poems to suggest the narrative logic of the story, The Orphan and Its Relations takes references from domestic life, myth and folktales, and artworks “to bridge,” as Robert Creeley said elsewhere of Robinson’s work, “between the physically given world and that other we gloss with words, yet apprehend insistently as the defining presence of our lives themselves.”
