Robin Becker received the Lambda Award in Poetry for All-American Girl and has held fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. Her books include Tiger Heron, Domain of
One of Becker's particular talents is an ability to make an
anvil of one word the rest of the poem then bends around . . .
Observant songs of history and elegy, these poems turn our faces to
what we can do with love and language, and what we can't.--Lambda
Literary Review
"Animals and family are important in Becker's world. In fact,
animals are family. . . . The endearing company of our fellow
creatures is part of what makes me feel at home in Becker's poetry.
Her acceptance of natural cycles enriches the intimacy she builds.
Many of the poems in 'Tiger Heron' deal with age, aging, dying, the
deaths of parents and friends, the ongoing presence of the dead.
Yet this is by no means a gloomy book, as the motif of loss is
continually leavened by Becker's exuberant homage to
appetite."--Women's Review of Books
"Becker has developed a collection of poems that offer a
realistic view of life, living and dying in a compassionate voice
that is calming as you page through the poems in 'Tiger
Heron.'--Fox Chase Review
"Becker's Tiger Heron, rich with animal life from the flying
squirrel and prairie dog to inhabitants of the coral reefs of the
Caribbean, expresses outrage and grief over the ongoing destruction
of these ecosystems. A moving poem deals with homophobia, another
celebrates Yiddish, 'a mongrel, Middle-High German.' These vivid,
self-confident lyrics ranging from villanelle to couplet deserve
close reading."
--Maxine Kumin, Pulitzer Prize winner
"Grief and loss punctuate Tiger Heron, but through this
dizzying emotional landscape, Becker's technical prowess
dazzles."--Lilith Magazine
"Robin Becker looks straight at the failures of our human species,
yet never loses her compassion or reduces the complexities and
paradoxes to easy conclusions. Deftly, precisely, these poems
express their wisdom in lines that surprise and delight. They are
clear as open windows through which we see our lives."
--Ellen Bass, author of The Human Line
"Robin Becker's poems have the limpid clarity of an early Flemish
painting, the crisp details always fusing into a larger
illumination. Complicated loss, unsparing truth, animal grace,
small comforts--her deft and daring language yields them all up
fresh, the paint still wet."
--Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home
"The surprise of this book is that the poems are actually
stories--about devotion and death and decay--but somehow they're
not sad stories. Because in all of them, Robin Becker reaches into
the shadowy corners of love and pulls out feelings I didn't even
know I wanted named. I didn't know you could sneak so much life
into poems about death."
--Sarah Koenig, producer, This American Life
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