Nichole Lefebvre Reviews Valencia Robin's Ridiculous Light

At The Rumpus, Nichole Lefebvre introduces readers to Valencia Robin's debut collection, Ridiculous Light, winner of the 2018 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. The volume contains poems written as early as the 1960s, as recent as present-day. Lefebvre observes that in her poems "we catch glimpses of depression and loneliness: 'still somehow we get out of bed, / put on a little lipstick just in case.'" Picking up from there: 

We read pages of reasons not to get out of bed, including a recalled warning from the speaker’s mother:

And ask me about the junior high school
she transferred me to, the teachers that refused to call on me,
the students who pretended I wasn’t there, that all she said
before giving her shy, awkward child to those people was,
The world is white so you better get used to it.

As evidenced by the memories in this book—wary and wondering, knowing and hopeful—the speaker has not gotten used to a white world, anything but. In “Milwaukee, 1968,” Robin writes, “I was there the day black stopped / being the worst thing you could call somebody” … “I marched / right up the stairs to our second floor flat / still singing loud and proud.” Rather, the poet has witnessed and mulled over and felt deeply, her blackness and womanhood, turning life into art, making poems that remain always open-minded and questioning, with a masterful tension between joy and pain, delight and despair.

Valencia Robin appears guided by her—to quote Alice Walker again—“heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength.” Robin holds within these poems a deep reverence for her poetic and familial ancestors (the book is dedicated to her mother), and an abiding awe in the present moment.

The phrase “and yet” appears ten times in this book—that’s in nearly one third of the poems—posing an action or situation that the world expects to knock the speaker down: a father who “isn’t a father but an absence”; “divorced more years, than married”; news of “a father / putting his child back together like a jigsaw puzzle.” And yet, the speaker questions her reactions, allows herself to feel and think through contradictions, complications. “And yet this bright spur / inside of me—specter and marrow, / waves and waves of vanishing light.” And yet, she holds on.

Continue reading at The Rumpus.