INFORMATION DESK

From an acclaimed and wildly imaginative poet, this is a book-length poem that is both a work of art history and a coming-of-age poem set in a museum.

Robyn Schiff's fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in three parts with long, sinuous sentences, based on the poet's first job out of college, fielding questions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's information desk. The poem meanders in and out of the museum and the artworks collected there but also weaves through Schiff's own life, as well as touching on an impressively broad range of themes, including illusion and deception, entomology (each section begins with an invocation to a parasitic wasp), consent, infestation, how the seeds of trees are scattered and propagated, notions of exhibition and restoration, and the often-violent sourcing of the wood and pigments that are used in art.

INFORMATION DESK: AN EPIC is driven by Schiff's instinct to further open her poetry to her documentary and narrative impulses. She uses the poem to wonder how formal structure and information - forming and informing - are related and how soul quest and intellectual query - searching and researching - can meet in a poem that has novelistic sweep but is nevertheless factual. The result is a poem that is as concerned with the violent forces of power and world history that drive the museum's encyclopedic collecting as it is with the making and meanings of art.

For readers of poets like Jorie Graham, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Matthea Harvey, and Mary Szybist whose work employs rich imagination and long lines.

Robyn Schiff is the author of three collections of poetry: Worth, Revolver, and A Woman of Property, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Schiff's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Boston Review, The Yale Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. The recipient of a 202223 Rome Prize in Literature, Schiff lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and is a professor of English and creative writing at Emory University.