Villain Songs

"Poetry's work as retrieval and repair has never been more vigorously practiced than in Villain Songs. Looking into the violence that is, too often, at the heart of family life, Tammy Robacker enacts a scrutiny that leaves everyone--not least the self--irradiated. Early in this bracing book, Robacker declares that her poems are 'a fire burning / to reach the other side / of my teeth.' And so, with a furious but deliberate poise, the poems do exactly that, giving image to what had been in th...