BALANCE SHEET
by Kit Robinson
"Kit Robinson's new Roof book, Balance Sheet, includes, besides the long-lined title poem, the one-word-to-a-line four-lines-to-a-stanza poems of "Ice Cubes II" and the variously-composed numbered lyric poems that comprise the opening sequence, "Counter Meditation." The three sections of the book, though almost alarmingly discrete, do, at the same time, compose a balanced sheet. This balance, and its happy control, is one of the enduring charms of Robinson's latest book. Balance Sheet is just that, a various, wry look at apparent life both inside and out at midpoint, balanced in the battering flux of myriad informations, all as "right" and "wrong" as ever. Kit Robinson's reflective work is articulate and compelling witness to the ominous sign sof our time."- Robert Creeley
"The centerpiece of Kit Robinson's new book is a sort of do-it-yourself panic ode, a high-wire juggling act, a breathless farce in which every word seems to be knocked out in a fast-paced narrative of love and capitalism."- Beverly Dahlen
"I read the entirety of Balance Sheet as the saga of an acculturated mental traveler arrived at the refractive limits of sense and still counting. The smarts line up neatly as ever, percipience beeping, tenderness written by hand."- Bill Berkson
"Robinson's verbal phrasings make a precise match to the measure of his getting around in contemporary in-time living, and the edgy specificity that results is charged with comic energy. But in Balance Sheet, he has developed quickness and hilarity into something very like wisdom—surrounding his accuracies in another measure-one that's hard toname but which expands time. Despite the immediacy and contemporaneity of the material, Robinson is writing about the infinite and timeless."- Lyn Hejinian