Works by
Robin Becker
(Poet)
[1951 - ]

• Personal Effects: Poems (1977) with Marilyn Zuckerman and Helena Minton, eds

• Backtalk: Poems (1982)

• Giacometti's Dog (1990)

• All-American Girl  (1996) -- Co-winner, 1996 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry
  Robin Becker's poems in her Lambda Book Award winner, rove the terrain of loss and grief: the streets of childhood in Philadelphia where she courts other women against the backdrop of our country's Founding Fathers...

• The Horse Fair: Poems (2000)
  Becker investigates how marginalized individuals negotiate public and private spheres, while inventing sustainable communities. She also explores anti-Semitism, cross-dressing, and painter Rosa Bonheur's lifelong relationships with women.

• Venetian Blue: Poems (2002)

• Domain of Perfect Affection (2006) -- Finalist, 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry
  In Domain of Perfect Affection, Robin Becker explores the conditions under which we experience and resist pleasure: in beauty salon, summer camp, beach, backyard, or museum; New York or New Mexico. “The Mosaic injunction against / the graven image” inspires meditations on drawings by Dürer, Evans, Klee, Marin, and del Sarto. To the consolations of art and human intimacy, Becker brings playfulness—“Worry stole the kayaks and soured the milk”—suffused with self-knowledge: “Worry wraps her long legs / around me, promises to be mine forever.” In “The New Egypt,” the narrator mines her family’s legacy: “From my father I learned the dignity / of exile and the fire of acquisition, / not to live in places lightly, but to plant / the self like an orange tree in the desert.” Becker’s shapely stanzas—couplets, tercets, quatrains, pantoum, sonnet, syllabics—subvert her colloquial diction, creating a seamless merging of subject and form. Luminous, sensual, these poems offer sharp pleasures as they argue, elegize, mourn, praise, and sing.

See also:

• Ploughshares Vol. 12 No. 4 (1986)
  Poetry and Fiction issue

• Robin Becker (1951- ) (1993) by Leslie Lawrence