Oh You Robot Saints!

by Rebecca Morgan Frank

Part bestiary, part litany, part elegy, Rebecca Morgan Frank’s Oh You Robot Saints! is populated by a strange menagerie of early automata and robots, including octobots and an eighteenth-century digesting duck, set alongside medieval mechanical virgins and robot priests. From a riveting robobee sonnet sequence that links weapons of war and industrial fixes for infertility to a microdrama sketching out a missing Sophocles play on the mythical bronze man, Talos, these muscular poems blur and sing the lines between machines and the divine. This lyrical exploration of the ongoing human desire to create life navigates wonder and grief, joining the uncanny investigation of what it is to be, to make, and to be made.
 

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published February 27, 2021

About the author

Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of four collections of poetry:Oh You Robot Saints! (Carnegie Mellon 2021); Sometimes We're All Living in a Foreign Country (Carnegie Mellon 2017); The Spokes of Venus (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2016; and Little Murders Everywhere (Salmon 2012), a finalist for the 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The winner of the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for a new manuscript-in-progress, she is also the recipient of a Meier Foundation Achievement Award, a Mississippi Arts Commission Fellowship, and a Reynolds Fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poems have in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Guernica, The Kenyon Review, Diode, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere. Co-founder and editor of the online magazine Memorious.org, she lives outside of Chicago where she is the writer in residence at the Hemingway Foundation. She teaches in the graduate programs at Northwestern University and OSU Cascades and serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.

Reviews

[Michael Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two poems in this collection will stay with me for the rest of my life:
- Ode to the Robobee.
- Offerings.

This entire collection of poems caused me to constantly look towards the natural and the imitative, the appreciation for organic versus artificial. So much to chew on. I’m not a poet, but Rebecca Morgan Frank’s work makes me not only think, but feel. Lots of feels.
I loved this collection and plan on reading it several more times.

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really smart, interesting collection of poems that delve into what it means to be automated, autonomous, made, formed, alive, not alive, connected, disconnected. The poems are sharp, precise, intelligent in their questing. I did secretly want more robot persona sci-fi vibes so if you too are dreaming this book will deliver on a particular vision you have for the types of poems robots might write, well it's not that. But it is very very good.

[Jenna Goldsmith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal. Just when you think you *know* what this book is about, you encounter a poem that sends you into an entirely new spiral of thinking.

[Catherine Elcik · Rating 5 out of 5]

My brain couldn't follow all the allusions in this collection, but my my heart was caught in the riptides of grief and hope in these poems, so my soul is richer for having read them.