How The Light Gets In: New and Collected Poems 1969-2014

Kirk Robertson is the djinn of the desert whose complex verse exits from the broken jar of its vast solitude. His poems are rendered with a realism so real it is organically surreal, the skilled precision of a whip slashing the sudden end to a line. He s an unequalled word-portraitist of the desert, but also a man of the world, with a lived-in sense of humor and appreciation of women. His love poems gather roughly near-worship, with a solid sense of the body and wary knowledge of the fragility of relationships. This powerful collection evokes a unique landscape spare, unadorned, unforgiving, yet beautiful, open, gently self-mocking, totally dedicated to love and unabashed curiosity. --Andrei Codrescu, So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2012
I first read Kirk Robertson s work 30 years ago in the cab of a U-Haul. I was leaving everything I knew behind, leaving Tulsa, moving to Nevada where the neon, Kirk assures us, beckons us in from the dark, where notes are signed with big lipsticked kisses and no return address, where it s hard to tell the difference between dreamers and fools. His poetry made me see how this starkly beautiful desert was both brutal and tender, how I would find my home at last. Keep this book in your truck, take it wherever you go. It might save you, too. --Gailmarie Pahmeier, The Rural Lives of Nice Girls
Along with Walter Van Tilburg Clark and Robert Laxalt, Kirk Robertson is a Nevada literary pillar. Now finally we have a definitive collection of his work funny, heartbreaking, rugged, and insightful. Robertson s poems are dipped into the heart of the West, both what it used to be and what it is today. How The Light Gets In is breathtaking and necessary reading. I couldn't recommend it more highly. --Willy Vlautin, The Motel Life and The Free

Kirk Robertson, a native of Los Angeles, was a poet, essayist, publisher, editor, and artist. He lived in Nevada since 1975. His writings have appeared in numerous anthologies, journals and magazines. He received the Water Mark Breakthrough Award in 1985 for his book of illustrations, Ar*ti*facts.
Robertson was the founder, editor, and publisher of Scree magazine and Duck Down Press in Fallon, Nevada. He was involved with the Churchill County Arts Program, the Nevada State Council on the Arts, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and was an editor of neon, the art journal of the Nevada State Council on the Arts. His work is best described by his colleague and friend, William Fox, as following "the tradition of William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley, the stresses of American life and language inextricably linked in a spare, unforgiving cadence...at their best his poems, won through years of painful life and thought and craft, take the heart out of you and offer it up to the clean desert sky."