Eschatology in Crayon Wax: Poems Volume 33

Joshua Robbins

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Joshua Robbins's much anticipated and smartly provocative second book, Eschatology in Crayon Wax, evokes a feeling of being caught between a fragile yearning to be transformed and a whirlwind of botched divinity. Robbins faithfully asserts, "Paradise / doesn't care / how you get there. / Only that you try," and is met with divine contempt and a commandment to "shape ashes into ashes" because "besides / I can't tell you what on earth I'm doing." In the world of these poems, all one can do is survive the contradictions and cruel inscrutabilities embedded in a contemporary life of vacant tract houses, RFID, mall shooting bullet casings, drone targets, miscarriages, divorce, and suicide. These poems are in deep conversation with the theodicies of the book of Job, evangelicalism, class theory, and even the manic crises of Berryman's Dream Songs. At times elegiac, always fearlessly confessional, even tragicomic, Robbins does not resist hope. With intelligence and style to spare, Robbins shows a fierce concern for this world of things, caught as we are between what is and what should be.

Book Details

Publisher: Trp: The University Press of Shsu
Publish Date: Feb 20th, 2024
Pages: 92
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.40in - 0.30in - 0.30lb
EAN: 9781680033076
Categories: • American - General• Eschatology

About the Author

JOSHUA ROBBINS is the author of Praise Nothing (University of Arkansas Press, 2013), part of the Miller Williams Series in Poetry. His recognitions include, among others, the James Wright Poetry Award, the New South Prize, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in poetry from the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He teaches creative writing at the University of the Incarnate Word and lives in San Antonio.

Praise for this book

"In Eschatology in Crayon Wax, Robbins achieves a miraculous balance between doubt, hope, and despair. These are poems that desperately want to praise, but never at the price of dishonesty. The beauty that we witness here survives in a suffering world--and is more compelling for it. Easily one of the best books I've read this year."
--Michael Shewmaker, author of Leviathan

"Joshua Robbins's new book is a collection of modern psalms of pain and pleading, making doubt a form of worship. In each line, I see the open American road and the lonely churchgoer. 'What keeps me yearning?' he asks. This book does."
--Andrea Palpant Dilley, Christianity Today

"In this follow-up to his excellent debut collection, Joshua Robbins simultaneously expands the scope of his imagination and focuses his exacting attention on the deepest questions we face as moral actors in a broken world. Robbins has the courage to get angry with God; to confront Him, doubt Him, plead with Him; to lift our suffering toward His absent face. And he has the greater courage to let God respond in a voice that is by turns frustratingly distant, intimately critical, and violently beautiful, a voice embodied in the 'grackle's throaty ca-chings, ' in a mural of the crucifixion on a cinder block wall, in 'the way the setting sun sifts / its burdens down / through the horizon's // Dusty exhalations / and onto the blocks / of vacant houses compliant in their rows / silent and searching / for heaven or stars.' This challenging and immensely quotable collection deserves courageous readers and rewards them with pleasures that go deep enough to hurt."
--George David Clark, author of Newly Not Eternal and Editor-in-chief of 32 Poems

"Robbins's Eschatology in Crayon Wax vacillates between prayer, psalm, and song, creating a gorgeous lyric middle-ground that complicates those very forms and our existence within them. Through conversations between an 'I' and God-figure, these poems probe into the very core of human relationships, asking how to keep reaching and surviving in the face of suffering. 'Listen, ' these poems insist, 'I'm afraid there is / no other world / I'm afraid this will never be enough.' Yet, despite this, or perhaps because of it, Robbins reminds us to keep singing and listening. This is a book you will want to hum to yourself in private and read aloud to let its music lift off the page in chorus. It is a book as much about our individual spirituality as it is about our shared humanity. It is a transcendent read."
--Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, author of 40 Weeks.

"With a forgiving spirit, unrelenting, patient eye, and deft lyricism, the poems in Joshua Robbins's Eschatology in Crayon Wax render our damaged yet redeemable landscape, and the big sky of their author's heart. Claiming innocence as its baseline, these poems probe our individual destinies as well as our species' and our planet's with ingenious skill. The poems' varied tonalities allow for hope, anger, and resignation to interrogate each other in cascading layers of drama and revelation. This is beautiful, hard earned poetry, a finely crafted gift that I will long treasure."
--Khaled Mattawa, author of Fugitive Atlas

"Robbins masterfully and seemingly effortlessly blends the ancient with the contemporary, the religious and the secular, the eternal with the ephemeral. . . . Whether intrigued or unsettled by the title of the collection, no reader should avoid Eschatology in Crayon Wax for fear of encountering an uncritical expression of the dogmatic or the blasphemous. In equal measure, there is devotion and irreverence. There is faith and doubt. There is the sacred and the profane. For believers and nonbelievers alike (as well as everyone in between), Robbins' latest collection of poetry has something to say, something to offer. I dare you not to listen. I dare you not to say Amen."

--Jonathan Fletcher in Portland Review

--Jonathan Fletcher "Portland Review" (11/10/2024 12:00:00 AM)