What inspired you to write Gathering Place? What notions appear in Gathering Place are those which have shown up in most of my writing. The fact that the book, a first, is published quite late in my writing life has for me made it a kind of selected poems, even though it's the length of a standard...

How did your book Mass for Shut-Ins come about? Several years ago, Greg Kosmicki, founder and editor of Backwaters Press, said he’d like to publish my next book. I held him at bay for a time, knowing I didn’t have enough poems of note to hold a collection together, but the last four years have...

How did your book [email protected] come about? I’d had [email protected] in mind for the title early on and couldn’t shake it. It went through a dozen permutations while I wrote and collected the poems but ended up back where it started. I liked the idea that it could serve as an address for...

The poems in Todd Robinson’s Mass for Shut-Ins are simultaneously societal and intensely personal, gleaned through a lens of unifying solitariness, the sense that “We, anonymous cannon-fodder” share more than we’ve ever differed, our burden of impermanence both unique and unexceptional: “Tyranny...