Askew

by Robert Vaughan

Askew is a collection of prose and poetry, and hybrid pieces in three sections.

Genres: Poetry

131 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2022

About the author

Robert Vaughan's writing can be found in over 650 online and print journals and he's an ten-time Pushcart Prize nominee. He was twice a finalist for the Gertrude Stein Award for Fiction (2013, 2014). His piece, "A Box," was selected for Best Small Fictions 2016 (Queen's Ferry Press). And, "Six Glimpses of the Uncouth" was selected for Best Small Fictions 2019. He has taught over a dozen writing retreats at Synergia Ranch, N.M., Mabel Dodge Luhan House, Ojai Retreat Center, CA., Cedar Valley, WI, The Clearing, and Devonfield Inn, MA. His sixth book is ASKEW (Cowboy Jamboree, 2022). He is the Editor-in-Chief of Bending Genres Journal. He offers online monthly weekend workshops and has an ongoing roundtable. And check out our two Bending Genres Retreats in 2026. Also, GET BENT anthology: www.bendinggenres.com.

KIRKUS REVIEW of FUNHOUSE: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re...

KIRKUS REVIEW of ADDICTS & BASEMENTS: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re...

Addicts & Basements (Civil Coping Mechanisms): http://www.amazon.com/Addicts-Basemen...

Diptychs + Triptychs+ Lipsticks + Dipshits (Deadly Chaps): http://www.createspace.com/4557487 and (http://www.amazon.com/Diptychs-Tripty...)

Microtones (Cervena Barva Press): http://www.thelostbookshelf.com.
MICROTONES review at PANK:

DIPTYCHS + TRIPTYCHS review:

Mark Kerstetter/ The Mockingbird Sings:
http://markkerstetter.com/2014/01/29/...

Reviews

[Robert Vaughan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my book, so I guess I am forced to love it. If I don't, then who else will?

[Meg Tuite · Rating 5 out of 5]

ASKEW is DEEP WATERS! Vaughan never writes from the shallow end! GET A COPY! Here are some quotes:
"I am not black darkness, night falling into pieces splattered onto a foreign planetary structure."
"The day is brainstorming to sun,
glistening grass greener than a ripe avocado."
"Look, I am living, but on fumes. And neither my childhood nor my future grows any smaller. Look how I touch the world, not as myself, but as an echo of who I was."

Vaughan delves into our human animal and brings the inner workings that we pretend don't exist to the forefront! This is necessary and masterfully written! DEEP LOVE!

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

loved, blurbed:

"I always turn to Robert Vaughan whenever I need a good kick in the language pants, a waft of 'salacious breeze' cut with 'a swallow's shriek.' In his latest collection, ASKEW, Vaughan continues to honor the 'small madness where senses reel behind the eyes.' Ache runs rampant, fractured by longing: for places and people, arrested moments, former selves, fleeting lovers. These may be compact poems and microfictions, but don't underestimate their size: Vaughan approaches the page with an honest, elastic and heartfelt expansiveness that holds space for us all."

[Len Kuntz · Rating 5 out of 5]

With his latest book, ASKEW, Robert Vaughan takes his unique talent for writing quirky, inventive and highly evocative prose to a level unparalleled even in today’s elite, prose poetry circles.
There is simply no one like him.
ASKEW both astounds and skewers the reader, sometimes leaving her/him/they spellbound, breathless and mired in after-thought. Sometimes gasping. Sometimes wounded. Sometimes chuckling nervously.
There is, perhaps, no author writing today who is able to “land the plane,” or write a last sentence, with such panache as Vaughan.
Here are but two examples, though there are literally dozens upon dozens of others throughout Askew:

A story, after all, is a kind of smothering.

The longer he swallows her arm, the more possibilities open up.

And it’s not only last sentences that Vaughan excels at, but also the ever-important first sentences:

Mother was fond of saying I was born during a tornado of light.

There are so many people going to the Grand Canyon to die.

You’re as loose as a vacant freeway.

The night my mother dies we’d watched Solaris at the Quad Cinemas…

One could teach classes, entire semesters, on how to write such utterly compelling first and last sentences from this book. One could, and likely should, teach this book for decades to come. One could, and should, read it, over and over again.
ASKEW is the perfect title for Vaughan’s latest collection because each piece is superbly off-kilter, just as the most fascinating parts of life are. Vaughan takes the mundane and flips it on its head, to wonderful effect.
He writes about bravery when it’s stuck under the covers, not readily apparent, breathless and wondering what’s next. He writes about fear and failure in ways that humanize not only his characters, but also, we as readers and flawed human beings.
What he never, never does, though, is bore us, let us off the hook, or allow us to know the direction each particular story is headed, which is the very signature of artistic expertise.
To speak specifically of any piece in ASKEW would be to ruin the reader’s chance at achieving a revelatory feeling of wonder and self-discovery—senses that the very best art strives to illuminate in us.
The plot in these pieces may be pertinent, but the language is so exquisite that it also sidelines our thoughts about narrative arc, which is also a sign of author authority, if not genius.
Simply put, ASKEW is a marvel, and then some—for the reader, for the writer, for those of us who aren’t yet sure who we are, what we’ve done, or where we’re headed.

[Shaun McMichael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vaughan’s ASKEW presents an authentic consciousness journeying through his biography and Americana kitsch and tragedy.

With dizzying word play in conversation with Henny Penny, The Peanuts, Sinead O’Connor, Sandy Hook, 9/11, and more, Robert Vaughan’s ASKEW presents an authentic consciousness journeying through his biography and Americana kitsch and tragedy. This one will leave you dizzier than a night of stiff drinks! Are these pieces poems, fiction, creative non-fiction? Editor-in-Chief of Bending Genres, Vaughan laughs in the face of the question as he rhapsodizes the stop and start of romance, news cycles, seasons. Here, a caesura can provide commentary (“The Happy Couple”). Bodies and minds contort. And lives are measured in social media teaspoons. “I can’t say now how/ sorry the sun feels, vocabulary/ too sparse, a seismic shift,/a question under my breath:…..” (from “When Crossing Guarded”); Vaughan can stretch the continuum of passion-dispassion in a single verse and in doing so, his poetry becomes performance art, delivering a story (and a bodily experience) in the fewest possible words. Look no further than these lines from “Ode to the Dead”: “But/ forever the obtuse/unavoidable/transition/ sliding into death/ the departure/ the opaque separation of/our searing existences:/mutually exclusive”. Word combinations like these could K.O. the top poets of our age out of the ring. With each phrase, Vaughan nudges his sentences beyond the quotidian, not beyond but through the banal, rotating his verses on tilted axes so that they orbit round a reader’s mind trance-like in their impressionistic surreality.

[Nicholas Galinaitis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyed these. Thanks Robert for the wonderful poems. I think the coming of age poems are strongest. Consider "Illusion," my favorite from the collection:

"Mother was fond of saying I was born during a tornado of light. Once I was older, I'd mumble, 'it's the drugs,' under my breath. I will never be as sexy as the night we all swam naked in our quarry. Playing marco polo, the gibbous moon showering us like headlights in swamps. We played badass rap from Barry's cab, a remix, the way the beads of water slide down your thighs. That year, last of high school, I kept a stream of purple Christmas lights strung up around my room. I prayed to them, incoherently, more than once. Willing you back. Drugs are drugs you'd say, comparing heroin to moonshine. One Sunday I made out with Louis. Another night I got so drunk I argued with the TV. I fell into the hearts of women like a branded outlaw, the whiteness fluttering from my fingertips. And when you left for school, you made me promise never to tell that thing we did to anyone."

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

With a fondness for emotive enjambment (and a number of cameo geese!), Robert's pandemic-era collection of poems and flash fiction mingles luscious language and smart turns of phrase with themes of stained eros, familial tension, thwarted intimacy, dripping jealousy, and teenage nostalgia, tinged with the sadness of abandonments and departings. Peppered with some humor throughout, there also feels like a bit of inside baseball of an autobiographical nature that makes the references in some of the pieces less accessible to me than in most. The tidy pieces in each of the book's three sections are all told in the poet's mellifluous voice, which tends to rise and roll like ocean swells or the rhythmic blood flow of a mother's womb.

*Disclosure: I studied with the author for two writers workshops.

[B. Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

"How does one remain oneself in the/ongoing search for discovery?"--Robert Vaughan, The West was Once a Direction

The lyricism sings in this collection, and readers who appreciate the music of the line will find much to love in these poems. Perhaps what strikes me the most about "Askew" is Vaughan's gift for visualization; the imagery crackles with a vivid intensity that lingers in the mind's eye long after reading.

[Aimee Parkison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful read! A vivid and moving voice that grips the reader by combining genres of fiction and poetry. The prose is arresting and very much alive on the page.

[Leigh Chadwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read my review of this most excellent collection over at Identity Theory:

https://www.identitytheory.com/review...

[Shannon Wolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was delighted to spend this morning with the venerable EIC of my beloved Bending Genres: Robert Vaughan and his collection ASKEW. The most recent in a long list of excellent books, ASKEW and its speakers are sweetly sardonic with a gentle eye for the hollowed-out past: lost lovers, downed buildings, and the way life cannot help but to fall apart. As usual, Vaughan’s sizzling finesse with language singes our fingers as we move from page to page, anxious to see what comes next.

[Al Kratz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deeply personal, deeply intense collection.

“I asked you to stay before I ever really thought about what might happen if you did.”

It’s got great lines like above that cut. They cut inside and outside.

“I love you,
so much that I
disappear.”

“I’m trying to hand over the keys to your honesty.”

These poems are knives.

[A.S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Vaughan’s ASKEW is textual baklava, layered glimpses into longing, desire, heartbreak. The poems skew convention, jumping banks like a flash flood, sweeping the reader off their feet to splash down into the swirling maelstrom. And with a sudden plunge into deep waters, there’s disorientation, but the current is strong, each poem a silt-filled droplet permeating into the next, then the next, rushing ever onward to fathoms deeper still. Vulnerability floats beside the callous, the intimate with the public, pathos with the impish, the familial with the individual, heart with lust. Vaughan sings a slantwise chorus with gusto & aplomb.

[Joanne Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Vaughan's Askew celebrates the fresh image, the exploration of life, and the love of words!