Equipment for Living

“Equipment for Living is funny and smart.”—Louis Menand, The New Yorker“Ugh, there should be a law against being as smart as Michael Robbins. Here he is, interspersing these exhilarating micro-readings of modern poetry and pop music—which he treats, in a moving and 100% convincing way as a single tradition—with an overarching argument for the function of poetry! This book is itself “equipment for living,” not to mention “a sad and angry consolation.” It will depress you and uplift you and fill your head with music.”—Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and The Possessed“Michael Robbins can deal up and down with Wallace Stevens and Taylor Swift, Gwendolyn Brooks and Def Leppard, Frederick Seidel and Prince. He has done all the reading about the form, function, and economy of art, but also done the feeling about the desire and need of it. Unashamed, he wants to rock. Won’t you take a chance on him?”—Ben Ratliff, author of Every Song Ever and Coltrane“This man can write.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times“Equipment for Living sounds plausibly enough like a piece of technology in need of constant recharging. I took it with me on a recent tour through the bruised U.S. and no cords or batteries were needed. It ended up recharging me — funny, profane, insightful, petulant, elegant, heart-felt. Not that its heart is in the right place. Its heart is all over the place, which is where a good heart should be: spreading agony and consolation and devotion. We started out in Salt Lake City as fellow travelers leery of one another but by Nashville we were parting as friends determined to see each other again soon. (Don’t miss the last chapter “Playlist”; it’s the coda that reunites it all.)”—Mark Z. Danielewski, author of Only Revolutions and House of Leaves“Freakishly original.”—ELLE“Robbins is erudite and meticulous, widely and deeply read, [and] an agile thinker… Equipment for Living insists at every turn that despite its inherent parasitism, criticism is a creative discipline—a venue for originality and exploration, for agon and jouissance. In short, an art form. I only wish more critics would follow his lead.”—Los Angeles Times

Michael Robbins is the author of the poetry collections Alien vs. Predator and The Second Sex as well as the book Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music. His selected poems are featured in the second volume of the newly revived Penguin Modern Poets series. His poetry and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Bookforum, and many other publications. He received his PhD in English from the University of Chicago and lives in Brooklyn with the best cat in the world.

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