Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. "Here is some sorcery, not necessarily explicable. Here is the invisible; Robert Ostrom traffics in it. The poems of THE YOUNGEST BUTCHER IN ILLIONOIS are some of the most gifted I've ever read. 'We are not safe,' he writes—but nor would we ever, for a moment (here) want to be. There's something oddly shy about the way these poems comport themselves, but the imagination is brazen with yearning. The authority of craft is bracing: the lines are sutured but there are no scars. The dark, passionate, miniature universe Ostrom has composed is seductive and whimsical. This is a new voice—edgy, stricken with attentiveness, soft-spoken, numinous. Take him at his word."—Lucie Brock-Broido
About the Author
Robert Ostrom is from Jamestown, New York. He is the author of THE YOUNGEST BUTCHER IN ILLINOIS (YesYes Books, 2012) and two chapbooks, To Show the Living (The New York Center for Book Arts, 2008) and Nether and Qualms (Projective Industries, 2012). His poems have most recently appeared in Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Gulf Coast, and Cut Bank. He lives in Queens and teaches at the City University of New York and Columbia University.