A Can of Pinto Beans by Robbie Gamble

I have admired Robbie Gamble’s work for many years as it appeared in print and online journals. However, in reading these poems all at once, in one stellar collection, I feel the top of my head taken off. The collage of forms: memo, logbook, persona poem, and prose poems all serve to insure that the reader cannot look away from people coming with “unanticipated speed, in waves, on leaky rafts, [  ] or blistered feet/ on their last/ drips of adrenaline.” Weeks after encountering this work,  the images of a Hello Kitty Backpack, a can of pinto beans, and the marked location of the scapula still rise unbidden in my mind. These are necessary poems; poems that will change you.    

                                       –Susan Rich, Gallery of Poems and Maps: New and Selected Poems

Robbie Gamble’s poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, Cutthroat, Pacifica Literary Review, Poet Lore, RHINO, Rust + Moth, Slipstream, and  Whale Road Review, among other journals. Recipient of the Carve Poetry prize, and a Peter Taylor Fellowship at the Kenyon Summer Writers Workshop, he holds an MFA from Lesley University, and he serves as poetry editor for Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices.  Robbie worked for twenty years as a nurse practitioner with Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, and he now divides his time between Boston and Vermont.