Alien vs. Predator

A debut collection of poems about an equally savage and hilarious subject. Equal parts hip-hop, John Berryman, and capitalism seeking death and not finding it, Michael Robbins's poems are strange, wonderful, wild and completely unlike anything else being written today. As allusive as the Cantos, as aggressive as a circular saw, this debut collection will offend none but the virtuous. Every once in a while a book appears as if out of nowhere with uncanny authority and combines the shock of the new with the shock of recognition. Michael Robbins's Alien vs. Predator has given me a sense of what early readers of The Waste Land must have felt in 1922 and what it must have been like to pick up a copy of Wise Blood at the bookstore in 1952.