Poet Ross Robbins, a native Montanan, lives and loves in Portland, Oregon, with his cat, Ramona. He is a volunteer at the IPRC and is slowly but surely working his way through school. His poems have appeared in small journals such as BlazeVOX, HOUSEFIRE, Sound Literary Magazine, Vinyl Poetry, Alembic and Alchemy. He is an avid self-publisher of chapbooks. Ross’s new chapbook “80 Poems” is available now from Powell’s Books and St. Johns Booksellers. More of Ross’s work can be viewed on inknode.com and at rossrobbinspoetry.tumblr.com. Please feel free to contact him with any comments, questions, or invitations to read at rossrobbinspoetry@gmail.com. Here’s Ross describing this poem:
“This book (‘I want to say how I feel and be done with it forever’) originated as a means to share a lot of emotions in a short space. I wanted to have a bunch of short sections dealing with separate feelings, different emotional experiences. Somewhere in the writing of the poem, I decided to sort of structure it as a ‘day.’ It starts in the morning (‘Today I’m sleepy’) and moves on from there. Around the mid-point there’s ‘Midday’s matchless sharpness of mind…’ and at the end it’s bedtime. The ‘Midday’ section is my favorite piece of the poem. That’s as concise a description of PTSD as I’ll probably ever be able to offer. ‘What erupted yesterday’ refers to Keith’s death, which is talked about in more depth toward the end of the poem. That extended section is meant to show how I set out to detail all these different emotions, but I can’t help but get hung up on Keith. Keith McClung, in whose memory this piece is written, was a dear friend of mine who died in my home in October 2011. I have written about this in more detail in other poems, and those can be viewed on my website. I hope you enjoy the book.”