An Essential Melancholy is a devastating collection of poetry. It is a frank accounting of trauma and the grief that almost inevitably follows. Poet Lora Robinson graciously gives space for the full range and weight of the emotions and experiences that arise from the processing of said trauma and, ultimately, its healing. This collection bristles with unflinching honesty, deep vulnerability, and insurmountable resilience. “Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight,” theologian Albert Schweitzer reminds us. Lora Robinson takes that quote to heart: An Essential Melancholy spares nothing.

While reading An Essential Melancholy, I asked myself how tightly are we held by our past? Through ancient myth, surrealist art, statistics, Lora Robinson weaves her own voice to call out to the tight squeeze of painful memory. Sound and specificity sear her memory into yours, declare its presence on your tongue. She reminds you of one of the most important things we do with what we carry: "I tried to die more than once / and for this reason, I chose to live.

—Tracy Dimond, author of TO TRACY LIKE / TO LIKE / LIKE

Lora Robinson’s poems work like a “canary in the marrow,” warning us of how much there is to lament, minute-by-minute, but also how poems can sing the reader into a healing. In An Essential Melancholy, Robinson confronts the various intimacies of violence toward women, with a textured attention to image and with a voice empathetic to anyone whose ever felt like, “Grief is a kind of greed.” I am wowed and renewed by these poems, even as they break the silences that threaten to break every heart. What else can one call that but a blessing.

—Steven Leyva, author of The Understudy’s Handbook

Lora Robinson’s An Essential Melancholy is a quilt, the poems stitched together by hand with a scorpion’s tail and suture thread. Each burn hole and fray and stain is one more frangible moment that went unchecked, one more set of tears swallowed instead of shed. This quilt, like Dorian Gray’s portrait, reveals the hidden cost for the women who, in love or not, endured despite the battering of psyche and body. In “Natal rivers,” the speaker claims, “my body was a glass house,” as if the feelings and experiences were viewable to her public. And yet, it is indeed melancholy she feels, “I fever-craved the metallic taste / of self-immolation.” Robinson’s metaphors taste like iron, and when coupled with her exquisite lyricism, the poems are rendered essential.

—Ciara Shuttleworth, author of Rabbit Heart, Night Holds Its Own, and 4,500 Miles: Taking Jack Back On the Road

The poems in An Essential Melancholy find the art inside atrocity, giving readers a chance to breathe freer by providing a fresh empathy, which imbues every word of this work. This is a cinematic collection that cares about breaking cycles of violence and about comforting the violated. Hope takes many forms, but in this book, hope comes in the form of electrically lyrical verse that pierces, that opens us up, that fills in the excavations. Robinson’s poetry is an undaunted anodyne for our zeitgeist, one that’s the result of repeated traumas begetting traumas. And so, regardless the specifics that have befallen us, we each need An Essential Melancholy, because we each need all the truth, and beauty, and relief found in solidarity that we can get.

—Matthew Zambito, author of The Fantastic Congress of Oddities

Lora Robinson’s An Essential Melancholy is a fierce call for justice, both personal and political. While the subject of domestic violence is difficult, it’s necessary to have this volume that brings to mind poets like Eavan Boland or Rachel Mckibbens. Robinson stacks images which are arresting—“I glued shut the butterfly ribcage you cracked open”—but also reflective—“I lay awake wondering/…if a lighthouse ever loved a storm.” This debut is also timely, considering the reversal of Roe v. Wade earlier this year. Sadly, no line rings truer than “you are a bargaining chip/for political capital.” In An Essential Melancholy Robinson reveals the harsh realities of abuse, but, thankfully, isn’t afraid to conclude with a ray of hope.

—celeste doaks, author of American Herstory