Information Desk: An Epic

by Robyn Schiff

Robyn Schiff’s fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s information desk, where Schiff long ago held a staff position. Elaborately mapping an interconnected route in and out of the museum through history, material, and memory, Information An Epic takes us on an anguished soul-quest and ecstatic intellectual query to confront the violent forces that inform the museum’s encyclopedic collection and the spiritual powers of art.

Novelistic in its sweep, frantically informative, and deeply intimate in its private recollections, Information An Epic wayfares with riveting lyric intensity through an epic array of topics and concerns, including illusion, deception, self-deception, complicity, lecherous coworkers, the composition of pigment, the scattering of seeds, ideas, and capital, and insect infestations spreading within artwork. Along the way, Schiff pauses to invoke three terrifying muses—parasitic wasps—in desperate awe of their powers of precision and generative energy. Information An Epic undertakes a hemorrhaging ekphrastic journey through artifice and the natural world.

Genres: Poetry, Art, Audiobook, Nonfiction, Book Club, Literature, 21st Century

144 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2023

Reviews

[Ken]

Over 100 pp. of 6-line stanzas (even lines indented) wherein Robyn Schiff taps into her experience working the Information Desk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (shades of Frank O'Connor, who also worked there!) only her lo-o-o-o-ng poem owes nothing to Frankie, no. It's her own thing, indeed.

Mostly, it's a whitewater-of-consciousness where you follow Schiff's wordwise mind from one room in the museum to another, from one topic to another. She has a special interest in insects, particularly wasps and the humble cockroach. There are rats in the museum's basement and even a mouse behind the info desk, once. Fun times in the city!

If you like your sentences long and ornate, Robyn's your gal. Subjects and predicates are often separated by long strings of dependent clauses and/or phrases, all sorts. Ditto topics. Some come and go. Some just go. John F. Kennedy, Jr. even makes a cameo, giving you the time frame (read: pre-plane).

Did I lose track of her narrative thread at times? I confess yes. Did I bring things back into focus for some particularly good stuff now and again, too? Most certainly. A word wizard, she is, even if I wasn't exactly with her for the entire voyage (distracted by all the water getting into the boat, you see -- and oh, yeah, by the roar of the falls dead ahead).

Example nugget, without the indents (HTML which GR will not play ball):


... To appalling extent
stewardship is also
the entitlement with which

eight-year-old Roy Fairchild
claims, "It's as much mine as anybody's,"
when asked by Laura
in Delta Wedding,
"Is that your boat?"
Colonialism and the whole undertaking

in a hull. The swagger of him,
spitting and peeing off the edge
of the commandeered skiff--
that's not in the book--but you know
this kid. I have an eight-year-old.
Little shits like Roy grow

up on playgrounds peeling off their shirts and
stuffing them into their waistbands
where they catch the breeze like dirty
flags of American boyhood,
cocky Winslow Homer bullies
seeding the seats

of the classroom
with thumbtacks, ...

[Paige · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this. Loved loved loved it.

You know how sometimes you read a book and, even if you enjoy it, you think “I could have done that.”

Yeah, this is the exact opposite. Every phrase is such a wonder with words, twisting from topic to topic in ways that make no sense but are perfectly logical. I have no idea how she wrote this, and I am in awe of it.

Bought a copy to keep before I’d even returned it to the library.

[Carey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sealey Challenge 2025: 9/31

I’m so glad I chose to experience Information Desk as an audiobook. Previewing it in print, I wasn’t sure I would connect with Schiff’s stream-of-consciousness style, but in audio it felt natural, conversational, and immersive. It was as though she were speaking directly to me and guiding me through the museum!

The poem unfolds through Schiff's perspective as an information desk attendant, blending her admiration for certain artists, her fascination with insects, and her encounters with both the whimsical and the disturbing sides of museum life. At times, the narrative is light as we wander from gallery to gallery, pausing to consider brushstrokes or artifacts. This made me feel as though I were touring the museum with a witty, observant friend. However, it’s also punctuated by moments of real darkness, as she recounts instances of being sexually harassed by colleagues. These traumatic episodes often appear in fragmented glimpses, a structure that can feel both artistically intentional and, at times, disorienting.

What impressed me most was how Schiff’s approach moves beyond straightforward memoir or art critique. She acts as a narratorial guide through artworks while weaving in personal reflection, cultural memory, and historical shifts in art. The movement of the poem mirrors the act of walking through a museum: lingering here, drifting there, occasionally jolted by the unexpected.

Even when some thematic threads went over my head, I found the language sharp and engaging enough to carry me along. Information Desk is a unique fusion of art criticism, personal confession, and cultural commentary. While sometimes meandering and fragmented, it crafted a museum of the poet’s past that I could vividly imagine and experience!

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not smart enough for all of the art history in this, but I still really enjoyed it?

[Aquila · Rating 5 out of 5]

Captivating!

This is a brilliant collection of experience and memory primarily seen through the author's time at the Information Desk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The journey is fascinating and littered with so many curious side adventures that it is sometimes difficult to keep track of but I was absolutely entranced by the crafty wasps, sharp teethed sharks, and soft petals of orchids.

[Aumaine Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wild ride! Outrageous and full of stuff and the meditations stuff brings. Won me in the end

[Jatan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book-length epic poem — think Ozymandias or An Ode to a Grecian Urn — about the plunderous origins of art in the Metropolitan museum. The author’s reflections from her time working at the Met’s information desk form an undercurrent through the poem organized in three parts, with a different species of parasitic wasps introducing each part.

Perhaps it’s only fitting that in our age of machine-led discovery, rather than the Romantics’ adventurous (and also plunderous) spirit, much of the action takes place within the confines of the author’s personal and academic life.

A curious theory of the use of wasps’ is highlighted in the coda of this moving NYRB review: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023...

[Gregory Duke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Simply did not click with me. Free-associative dissociation that spirals through the MET as if it's the aesthete's inferno, muddled by colonial/sexist/bourgeois forces, consumed by inanity, and plagued by the scourge of millions of subjectivities, including, in this case, Robyn Schiff's. That's not to say this is purely a poetic critique of the MET (there's much love), but Schiff's strategy is to engage in art critique as a narratorial docent while involving confessional tendencies that expand the poem from being a single day tour through the museum to something that conjures up pre-9/11 New York and pandemic-era life. I didn't find the language itself particularly striking, which l require of the poetry I read. This also doesn't have enough wit or insight to heighten the poetry's form.

[andy]

I think I will be totally honest when I admit that I did not understand this book inwthe slightest. That was simply an effect of the poetry and my lack of understanding of the subject.

It could not fully understand the thought process of the poet and it was in a format I hadn't grown accustomed to.

The idea behind the book is brilliant, thats definite. But I don't think today or any time right now is the time to read this for me. I simply do not understand it.

[Andrei Rybin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe there is a compelling overall theme that I missed (colonialism bad?) but I think this is primarily a exorcism of inner demons (queue the many wasps and cochlear shapes O.o), which I think is more self indulgent of the author than interesting to read.

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ended up reading this in two sittings and mentally walking through the MoMA while I read the poems. A fun quick read that I would definitely recommend borrowing from a library and just putting on audio while walking through the MoMA itself.

[tinypinkfangirlrobots · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an interesting premise for an epic. Looking at the role of working the information desk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Schiff elaborately maps a path through some of the materials and interactions she had while working there through this poetic narrative.

There were some aspects that I absolutely loved in this. Leading us through artifacts and paintings I adored how movement works in this poem. Looking at art through the medium of art it was delightfully silly at times. I felt like I was wandering through the museum with a friend but there were some aspects of the trauma told in this poem that felt jarring and fragmented. I felt like there were things left unsaid and unseen. Overall I enjoyed this but there should be some trigger warnings for folks.

[Alia Shaukat · Rating 4 out of 5]

i’ve became obsessed with robyn schiff when she gave a craft talk/masterclass at SLC! in these sessions, she talked about marianne moore, syllabics, memory mapping, and her shoes — i was hooked!!!! this epic was incredible — both hilarious & heartbreaking as the reader follows her on spiral after spiral. the way she talks about art, museums, sexual violence, politics all in one was astounding. i think i’m not quite art-educated enough to receive all of the references, but i loved it nevertheless. what a great way to start off this semester!

[Lauren]

Missed the mark for me. Was looking forward to it based on the book jacket summary, but never coalesced. Not even our shared love of entomology made this make sense.

[soleil · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. I loved this.

[Patrizia · Rating 5 out of 5]

NOBODY does it like Robyn Schiff. Ahh! This was so good!

[ally duggan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I’m too dumb to understand this

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

To Much Information Desk

[Lilly Donohoe · Rating 2 out of 5]

i think poetry just isn’t for me- whilst i enjoyed this, i much prefer to listen to poetry rather than read

[Elena]

i should’ve read instead of listened :/

[Ash · Rating 4 out of 5]

My brain is sludge after reading this, but like good, enlightened, satiated sludge. This Epic is INSANELY dense with fun facts and not-so-fun facts. Tons and tons of Information, which I guess is probably the bit. I would say it's a little dense to a fault. Sometimes, the stream of consciousness and onslaught of Information makes it quite difficult to wade through. But if you just slow it down and take it a few bites at a time, it's a very enjoyable read, and I've learned so much.
p.s. the cuckoo paper wasp section is my favorite section of the Epic. BY. FAR. which is saying a lot cause I really enjoyed this book.

[Veronica Zaleha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This incredible stream-of-consciousness poem leads us through the museum collection, the colonial history of the world from which it's pieces come, and the maze of the speaker's mind and memory. A feminist, post-colonial treatise filled with fascinating facts and conjuring deeply rooted, relatable feelings in this reader.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

"To compartmentalize; to hide things even from oneself is European expertise as easily exported to the colonies as a cockroach in a shipping crate."

[Dan Cassino · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful series of long interconnected poems about the Metropolitan Museum of Art (where the poet worked at the information desk), insects and art. Schiff juxtaposes the grand with the quotidian, both in existence (hence the bugs) and the realities of working (especially as a woman) in the greatest art museum in the world. As the poem argues, the day to day rituals of the wasp or the security guard are themselves worthy of interest, not just because of the jewel like carapace or being surrounded by Rembrandt. Beautiful, moving work with wonderful lasting images.

[Jiapei Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Using parasitic wasps as her muses, Schiff traces the history of art through hidden sacrifices in different pigments (black from charred bones, red from cochineals), unacknowledged manual labor that was indispensable in executing an artist's vision, and art forgery / reproduction / transaction. Schiff is not afraid to shock you with gross imageries, yet their haunting beauty lingers. Much like the beauty of art we consume: tucked away behind each museum exhibit is money made from dirty means (e.g. the Sackler family).

[Spencer Reads Everything · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not someone who stays fully current with contemporary poetry. I like poetry, I read it often, and I enjoy it, but I wouldn’t call myself an expert. That said, I make it a personal goal to read all of the Pulitzer finalists and winners each year across the book categories, and I especially look forward to the poetry selections. I almost never know the poets ahead of time, but I almost always find something memorable, strange, and deeply rewarding. Robyn Schiff’s Information Desk was no exception. I loved it.

The concept alone is wonderfully specific. Schiff uses her time working the information desk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a launching point for an extended meditation on art, labor, memory, vulnerability, systems, power, and what it means to be physically and intellectually embedded inside an institution like the Met. It sounds narrow, but in fact it opens outward in almost every direction. She blends art history, personal experience, architectural detail, insects, furniture, visitor questions, sexual harassment, and motherhood into a single fluid poetic voice that is hard to describe but immediately compelling.

The structure is epic-length yet conversational. Not casual or offhanded, but curious and relentless in its associative intelligence. Schiff’s voice is intimate and encyclopedic, and she shifts rapidly from reflections on decorative arts to critiques of institutional language, from recounting a real-life encounter with John F. Kennedy Jr. to reimagining the materials used in old paintings. She uses her memory, observation, and knowledge, and she is always aware of the act of writing itself and what that implies.

The writing is lyrical, layered, and often dizzying in the best way. One early poem about the jewel wasp and its parasitic conquest of a cockroach becomes a meditation on power, sex, regret, biology, instinct, and betrayal. The description is specific and unrelenting:

"It is, it is, it is enough, but
this is evolution and we’ve
already come this far."

She has a remarkable ability to stitch together the physical and the philosophical, to make language feel tactile and also overwhelming. The tension between personal story and cultural history pulses underneath every section.

Her time at the museum is a central thread, but it is not a simple memoir. Rather, the museum becomes a metaphorical and literal space for reflection, and the desk itself is a locus of questions. Visitors ask about restrooms and galleries and sculptures, but they also make unwanted comments. She recounts moments of being touched or spoken to inappropriately by coworkers or guards, and the institutional refusal to name these acts becomes its own haunting refrain. The desk becomes a confessional and a stage as well as a pulpit and a fortress. In one especially disturbing moment, she recounts being told by her boss and his intern that what happened to her under the desk wasn’t harassment because “there is no word for it; so it isn’t happening.”

Schiff never slips into a victim narrative or a simple polemic. Her stance is more complex. She observes, dissects, and returns to the scene again and again with new angles, not to sensationalize but to document and understand.

There is also great beauty in this book. Her language around visual art is stunning, especially when she describes pigment and paint in material terms. Her discussion of vermilion and bone black pigment including how they were created, what they cost, what was sacrificed to produce them all adds gravity to the act of viewing and remembering. One of my favorite sections describes the old red dye cochineal and how its history is buried inside every red used in paintings from the period:

"Press
one, like this, between thumb
and forefinger and out comes their one
self-defense: carminic acid"

She is also very good at connecting the present with the past, making connections that feel simultaneously researched and felt. The experience of walking through a museum is never just about the art. It’s about being a person with a body, navigating beauty and silence, trying to hold memory and loss in the same frame.

A word, too, about the audiobook. Schiff reads the poems herself, and I highly recommend listening. The rhythms and cadences of the book become clearer through her performance. Hearing it aloud helped me grasp the tone and structure more easily than I would have through print alone. The lyricism of her writing really comes alive in her voice.

This is not an easy book. It is demanding in the best sense of the word. It challenges the reader to follow long threads, to let go of linearity, to allow emotion and intellect to work side by side. It is also rewarding. I finished it feeling like I had spent time inside a strange and sacred space, one that I didn’t fully understand but could feel deeply.

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Information Desk to anyone who reads contemporary poetry, anyone interested in museums or memory, or anyone who wants to see how a poet can build something extraordinary out of the day-to-day materials of a job. It’s a remarkable achievement, and I’m glad the Pulitzer committee recognized it.

For more of my thoughts, check out my video:
https://youtu.be/DBtx8GnbxBE
For more reviews, check out my channel:
http://www.youtube.com/@SpencerReadsE...

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s arguable that all of Schiff’s books are concerned with ekphrasis or the work could be considered a long conversation with what should be and shouldn’t be relevant in discussions about art. Her book, Information Desk provides a solid and conspicuously relevant position to consider art, and the “information” that she personally includes in her thinking about it. Especially how people attend to art, the extreme structures built around art to serve it and remind everyone it’s really art, so it should be treated like art. And the pleasure in these tautological gestures (pay attention, please, to the art in talking about art) is, for me, about the vast influences present in the art itself. Schiff has her own cataloguing mode, that feels like part Montaigne and part Marianne Moore. One reference to nature can call to her mind another reference to nature. Or the domestic. Or history. It’s an an encyclopedia, or encyclopedic when formed into poems that celebrate the facts but also see something connecting these facts together, and I’m just the reader who gets to witness all this connecting action going on. That’s art. An art of information. And this trope where the poet works at the “information desk” at a world-class museum feels like a Whitmanian inflation of self, but like, low-key. Because her position is so far down the hierarchy of museum personnel.

The poet is merely attending to the vast encyclopedia of information collected by a “museum,” or perhaps the better term would be accounting for the vast encyclopedia. Because in addition to any art object she might have had to guide patrons to, there was the provenance that brought the object to this museum. The history of the object since it’s been in the museum. The history that would have resulted in the art piece today. And it is all art, by virtue of it being connected to the museum. By analogy, then, all the information she has collected in life is poetic, and their appearing in these poems ensures that. And, as with the processes necessary to generate pigments for Rembrandt or any of the artists she attends to, the poetic fact isn’t just drawn into existence from nonexistence. Poems do not spontaneously generate. They result from a lifetime’s worth of attention. The labor of attention. Forming a history. A procedure for certain pigments of paint that will, say, reduce bone to ash, which will then be mixed with oil. And the artist will know how to use that for affect. The poet’s biographical facts are lived and memorized and later made relevant by the poet. And there might be a procedure of understanding the procedures necessary to do this. Except they haven’t been attended to by a staff of highly trained personnel. They haven’t been funded by wealthy capitalists. And so what any poetry reader has to rely on is the poet’s word.

[nathan]

wow tbh. this poet was my /introduction to creative writing: poetry/ teacher in my early days of college and I had no idea that for a whole semester I was writing poems for someone who writes poems this good. i’m glad i didn’t know. i would have been very self conscious.

i went to a live reading of this last week and impulsively decided to buy it at the table i didn’t know would be outside the reading room. a great choice! in the introduction, emory creative writing department diva jericho brown said something about how part of the greatness of robyn schiffs poetry is how it teaches you to read it. that is very true.

this long long poem is wildly unpredictable even though everything somehow also feels inevitable. it makes more and more sense and provides you less and less comfort as it bludgeons through its own and the worlds history with a heavy hitting hammer (but wielded by quite the careful, skilled hand). can you tell by the way i’m writing this review that i just finished reading a book of poetry? probably. maybe one day ill feel ready to try writing it again (haikus don’t count).

the sense of timing in this is just SO good! things just kept returning in the perfect places and departing with such swiftness i was left stunned so often by its relentlessness. such a fun reading experience. has quite a bit to say about capitalism and colonialism and men but i think to say its primarily about those things would be lazy and maybe missing the point. that being said im not prepared to give you the alternative meaning you deserve. maybe just read the book.

bonus points: this book kind of convinced me not to get the tattoo of a quarter that i’ve been wanting for half a decade. (how do i choose between the eagle and george washington’s head???? hint: both are bad options).

anyway i liked this

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

from Part 1
I used to man the Information Desk in the center of the Great Hall

of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Bull's eye of that octagon
was an immense urn of flowers
arranged in silence by florists on
multiple ladders
each Monday

when the Museum was closed,
reminding us
that art is mourning. The week descended
on a continuum of scent
from bud to rot
as the gaping lilies dilated beyond

comprehension, the center of the center of the
center, wrenched
open for business
by the force
of time. By late Sunday you could stare right into
the carpels of those hybrids, called

"Big Brother Lillies" in garden
catalogs,
into the past of the
future, which is the same as the past of the present,
but also contains the very moment
of looking, as

a mirror does,
and a little more—just how much I don't know,
but might express
the warp of recalling the future in the past
by here inscribing: "I knew you would." (9-10)

from Invocation: To the Cuckoo Paper Wasp
Of the spirit of
the bald eagle, observed more easily in
situ than the
real estate dealings of

wasps, Benjamin Franklin is said to
have said he wished it not
the chosen emblem
of this land. That bald eagle's dishonesty
is bald-faced. You
must have seen one perched high

upon a dead spruce, his visage in
serious profile so
iconic it's like
beholding a living coin transacting the
wild air. There
is an eagle somewhere

on our money, isn't there? I could
swear it but what a long
time since studying a quarter. (74-5)

[Amy]

Dense and I often lost the thread and doubled back to try to pick it up before moving on. I love museums and this epic was interesting to me. I’m very curious about how Schiff plotted her course—it seems stream of consciousness, without much foresight or plan, but, for instance, I can see her mind sequencing these passages in part 3: sending a museum patron through the Sackler wing where Nan Goldin had done some kind of protest/performance art about the opioids the Sacklers produce and peddle (and I think Nan became addicted to them), her parents marrying the day Hitler invaded Poland, the speaker’s son who was at a fencing tournament, and the white porcelain figures the Nazis made their prisoners produce which they gifted to loyal Nazis, a popular figure of which was a male fencer. Like, whew, but in that portion in particular it seems muy importante to place those things in the correct order. Am also interested in the messages here about the laborers that made these many artworks possible, and the notion that “authorship is defined by intellectual conception, not manual labor” (I don’t know who said this or if it’s inherent in copyright law). Lastly, I haven’t figured out how the 3 poems about the wasps work in the volume but they’re interesting and sharply observed.

I’d have to read “Information Desk” another time (or even two) to gain greater insight into what it has to teach me. Perhaps I will before it’s due back at the library.