THE BOOK OF DEFINITIONS – Ross Robbins
THE BOOK OF DEFINITIONS – Ross Robbins
The Book Of Definitions is structured, as its name suggests, with titles ranging from “quietude - tranquility” to “classifieds – small, categorized newspaper advertisements” and definitions of poetic verse expanding in waves, unexpected and compelling at every page.
Ross Robbins is the first author whose work came to me through a combination of everyday happenstance and the existence of this press. We met at the Independent Publishing Resource Center, while Ross was printing copies of his chapbook Hot Bright Oyster and I was printing covers for one of our first handful of titles. He gave me a copy, I read it, I loved it – simple as that.
We have now worked together for 10 years, first releasing All In Black Blood My Love Went Riding in 2014, then The Three E.P.s , a collection of excerpts from longer works, in 2018. Now, at long last, we can share The Book Of Definitions with the world.
Red and gold sparkly covers. See galleries of both colors below, and please select your preference below.
(excerpts)
flyleaf – a blank page at the beginning or end of a book
not marred by colophon title or text: blank
stretch where I scratch your number
just before the title
before contents or after
denouement has come
or not come
this night
a hole in a thin
black dress sock
a sliced almond’s dust
bunny crown
on the linoleum
I drink a slow glass of tap water
I clear my throat
red version
psychosis – mental illness characterized by lost contact with reality
Amusing only to oneself. The blaring of a horrible and overwhelming siren. It spits acid in your ear, and it spits hard. You mime wrist-slashing to indicate the depth of your boredom. There is an air raid siren in your dreams. A mushroom of fire blooms atop a saucer of same. The doctor who’s been fucking you and his wife who doesn’t mind, they’ve kept you in a cage in the basement of the clinic, but this night you grease yourself in Vaseline and slip the bars. The three of you run through suburbs, “Come back! We didn’t mean it! He needs you! Please!” And then the alarm, the bloom, the end.
There is a dark magic in the way your mind unfolds (flowerily, lonelily) into psychosis. How your sentences are talking to themselves even as your eyes are straw- berries bulging from out the front of your head. They are dry and sticky. Words are prickling with potential. They can be anything, they might even be themselves. Accusing the light of day of being malevolent, of having intention. It is never a good intention, is it? Good in- tentions and hell and all that, so whatever. There used to be these things called rivers.
gold version
excursive – marked by digression; rambling
there i was
in a peachy skin
my fuzzy belly
shook the sky
old men threw bread to ducks beneath
a deep red sky
the likes of which had not been seen
so bloody since
a day when i
fell off my horse
the gravelly dirt
my bloody knee
and handheel split and when i sobbed the sob was deep
was deeper down than simple pain
or petty grief
i have seen the low
i have been below
i at the time
could not make sense of how blood could stop falling