Later on in the poem the speaker deadpans, “In front of the Best Buy, the Tibetans are released,/ but where’s the whale on stilts that we were promised?/ I fight the comets, lick the moon,/ pave its lonely streets.” The progression from ludicrousness to real pathos (a lone speaker paving the moon’s lonely streets) is earned but immediately undercut by the stanza’s final line: “The sandhill cranes make brains look easy.” Not only can I make no meaning from the line, but its function seems to be to detach from any real emotion the poem might have been hurtling towards. In the first line the speaker calls Rilke a “jerk,” which Robbins rhymes a line-and-a-half later with “berserk,” setting the tone for the entire book. There are many funny lines and instances of sharp wordplay in Robbins’ work, starting with the title poem that opens the collection. Of course behind the posturing is a real intimacy with the brands, bands and speech patterns that define our current moment, and I wish more of Robbins’ affection were on display as opposed to glibness. Fox, GED-alongside mash-ups of lines from classic songs and canonized poems (Everything/I look upon breaks into blossom, I guess) and a posture of indifference towards both the “old masters” whose lines he often bastardizes and the media onslaught of the twenty-first century. Predator by a tongue-in-cheek adherence to form splashes of pop culture and vernacular-American Apparel, Michael J. A critic and reviewer, Robbins ruffled feathers in the poetry world when, in a 2010 essay in Poetry, he slammed Robert Hass for his unabashed sincerity and “pseudo-profundity,” proclaiming that Hass “has made a career out of flattering middlebrow sensibilities with cheap mystery.” What, then, is the antithesis of a Robert Hass poem? A Michael Robbins poem, characterized in Alien vs.

Predator can be attributed to its author’s controversial persona. If poetry, like any form of entertainment, thrives on drama, then much of the buzz surrounding Michael Robbins’ debut Alien vs.

Aliens vs predator song