Robbi Nester

Robbi Nester (Poetry) | Lake Forest, CA

Booking Fee:

Negotiable

Will Travel:

Anywhere

Contact:

rknester_at_yahoo.com

Website:

http://www.robbinester-poet-and-writer.com

Robbi Nester is a poet, writer, educator, and editor living in Southern California. She is the author of a chapbook, Balance (White Violet, 2012) that follows a sequence of Iyengar yoga poses and a collection of poetry, A Likely Story (Moon Tide, 2014). She has also edited an anthology of poems about stories and shows on public media, The Liberal Media Made Me Do It! (Nine Toes, 2014) and a forthcoming anthology, Over the Moon: Birds, Beasts, and Trees—celebrating the photography of Beth Moon, which will appear on the Poemeleon Poetry Journal website very soon. Robbi’s poems, essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in many journals, anthologies, web sites, and blogs. She holds an MA from Hollins University, an MFA from UC Irvine, and a PhD from UC Irvine, and taught writing and composition for 35 years as an adjunct at various colleges and universities.

Books

Other-Wise (Kelsay Books, 2017). Poetry.

A Likely Story (Moon Tide, 2014). Poetry.

Chapbooks


Anthologies Edited


Blurbs, Press & Reviews

“In a style meditative, lyrical, succinct and spare, Robbi Nester turns her poet’s seeing eye and hearing ear, perked for the intriguing, very much towards a world full of ‘others’—bees, binturongs, muskrats, sea lions, luna moths, swallowtails, orchids, seventeen-year locusts, the Bedouin in the desert, the dead—in ways that respect their otherness, yet always touch our human selves. The self is here, too, born out of the ‘meager means’ of a childhood—with a ‘grim gargoyle’ of a father ‘full of fury’—yet, learning ‘how to take / the little that I had / making it more than suffice.’ These are poems lit by metaphors and codas of startling beauty and rightness. A seal with its eyes shut spins in place: ‘calm face composed, resembling a dead pharaoh / wrapped tight within his gold / sarcophagus, entering / the next world.’ For that Bedouin whose desert is like the sea: ‘Far away, the surf rises / arched wings of the angel, / messenger of the desert God, / whose silence contains everything.’ There is joy here at being in the center of ‘everything that is,’ hardly able to sleep ‘in all this brightness,’ joy in the hands that ‘can close / the circuit between body /and mind,’ in the hand that can, indeed, write ‘it all down.'”
—Judy Kronenfeld, on Other-Wise

“Whether one is nimble and supple enough to actually practice the fifteen yoga positions that form the subjects of the poems in Robbi Nester’s Balance, one will discover that these poems do what both yoga and the best poetry have always done: take one deeply within the confines of an experience while simultaneously expanding one’s awareness of the limitlessness of that very same experience. Balance is both deeply moving and truly enlightening.
—Richard Dillard on Balance (White Violet, 2012).

“Robbi Nester’s poems are like a magical realist romp, filled with flying girls, rats the size of goats, haunted TV sets, the golden demon god of capitalism, and orchestras playing the world into being. These are tall tales and myths, apocalypses and gothic parables, but at their core the impulse is as much lyrical as narrative, as much California pastoral as spooky magic. Nester is a naturalist of the unnatural, and whether she is simply describing the thriving life inside a pond or spinning out urban legends, you are going to enjoy these likely stories.”
—Tony Barnstone

Love what we do? Take a second to support us on Patreon!
Become a patron at Patreon!