Brimming with music, bursting with flora, the poems in Valencia Robin’s second collection are both a walking tour of local neighborhoods and a journey into space and across time-ways of looking and listening to the past in order to find our best way forward. Engaging with an array of artistic heroes-James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Eavan Boland, Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, Nina Simone, Pablo Neruda, and Stevie Wonder among them-Robin looks for guidance, grounding, and even hope in spite of the traumas she witnesses and experiences daily. In one striking masterpiece, she gives voice to a prescient childhood icon, Lieutenant Uhura of Star Trek , who brings the show’s unfulfilled vision of interstellar racial harmony to bear on the killing of black and brown bodies in contemporary America. Whether set in space or down the block in Charlottesville or Milwaukee, the poems in Lost Cities offer us hope amid the heartbreak of a fractured world.
