Alien vs. Predator (Penguin Poets)($15.90Value)

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WINNER OF THE BELIEVER'S READER SURVEY, BEST BOOK OF POETRY * SELECTED AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times * Slate * The New York Observer * Commonweal * Books & Culture * Vol. 1 Brooklyn * Complex * The Millions  * The Australian The debut collection of a poet whose savage, hilarious work has already received extraordinary notice. Since his poems first began to appear in the pages of The New Yorker and Poetry , there has been a lot of excited talk about the fresh and inventive work of Michael Robbins. Equal parts hip- hop, John Berryman, and capitalism seeking death and not finding it, Robbins's poems are strange, wonderful, wild, and completely unlike anything else being written today. As allusive as the Cantos, as aggressive as a circular saw, this debut collection will offend none but the virtuous. "Every once in a while, a book appears as if out of nowhere, uncanny in its authority, combining the shock of the new with the shock of recognition. Michael Robbins's  Alien vs. Predator  has given me a sense of what early readers of  The Waste Land  must have felt in 1922, what it must have been like to pick up a copy of  Wise Blood  at the bookstore in 1952."--John Wilson,  Commonweal "You don't get the instant satisfaction you might expect from a poet hungrily stalking the moment; Robbins's poems have their own distinctly contemporary appeal: They slowly develop into embarrassing pictures of ourselves. They aren't just shiny and fun, they're also sharp -- which makes them quite dangerous."-- The Boston Globe " The first important poet whose work can be appreciated only with an Internet connection, Robbins is a lot more than the first 'Google poet.' He is also a significant new poetic voice and, quite possibly, a living poet with a chance of developing a genuine popular following."-- The Weekly Standard "If later John Ashbery and David McGimpsey have proven that capitalist popular culture is a suitable subject for poetry, Robbins goes a step further and attempts its formal mimesis. And he does it really goddamn well."-- The National Post "Mr. Robbins's heart is not lovely but beating a bit arrhythmically; notdark but lighted by a dangling disco ball; not deep but as shallow andalert as a tidal buoy facing down a tsunami. Yet it's a heart crammedfull, like a goose's liver, with pagan grace. This man can write.... What puts his poems over is their sheer joy and dizzy command.... Reading Mr. Robbins's best stuff makes you feel something new is being flogged into existence.... He has a sky-blue originality of utterance." -- Dwight Garner, The New York Times "It's in his rhymes -- polysyllabic, serial, audacious -- that Robbins most resembles an M.C., and most distinguishes himself from other poets. He seems at least as interested in arranging sequences of identical vowel sounds as he is in getting consonants to agree. When he pairs 'Beckett' with 'cricket,' he sounds like Paul Muldoon, but when he rhymes 'Parkinson's,' 'Arkansas,' and 'dark clicks on,' he's channeling Jay-Z." -- The New York Times Book Review "Robbins is abrupt, conversational, surreal, and sarcastic - a wiseguy with vulnerability. Many of his poems end on a note of sadness or despair in a way that suggests what preceded it was an attempt by the speaker to put on a brave front, to man up or gut it out. But it's a measure of how well-crafted Robbins' poems are that he does a good job of conveying just what's a put-on and what's meant to be taken seriously." -- Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly "Robbins's poetry is quick as thought, as Constance Rourke might have put it ... it might be more true to say Robbins's poetry is thought, or rather a mind alive but not thinking at all, a jumble of memory and stimuli and distractions and it's-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue, never mind, a roaring in the head of someone talking to someone else while what he's really doing is talking to himself, but barely listening, and having the time of his life." -- Greil Marcus, The Believer "These poems are viciously inventive. Faster than you can rhyme stegosaur/megastore, Robbins code-switches between the English Canon and Top Forty: Nirvana and Blake, The Clash and Yeats, creating a political and social commentary that will make the hair stand on your head." -- Ange Mlinko "You may notice the cultural references first -- Guns N' Roses, Eric B. & Rakim, Fleetwood Mac, M*A*S*H , Star Wars -- and be tempted to tie Robbins to these anchors. But there are as many contemporary references in Eliot and Pound and Horace as there are in Robbins: carbon-dating isn't what distinguishes these poems. Robbins works in traditional and nontraditional forms that pivot on the beat, which he turns around, seamlessly and ruthlessly. The thread here is a long-distance conversation crammed into the available enjambment, as charged as the pop songs that play beneath the words." -- Sasha Frere-Jones "From the wild mixture of pop-culture and the English