forthcoming Fall 2016 from Omnidawn

the field traces the I across a constellation of lyric psychodramas, where the voice navigates the daily traumas of embodiment and the force majeure of the out-of-body experience.  At its center, this first collection from Robert Andrew Perez is a curation of the perils of love in an age of persistent angst, or the virtues of love from a persistently anxious mind.  This I in crisis posits itself in a multitude of lyric containers, vibrating in the tension of terror and ecstasy's diametric vectors through the curses of memory, emotion and contemplation.

Business hours for the poet Robert Andrew Perez include “mid nights we yield / to the meow of the web” and also “the present moment…the adjacency of the other city hums.” But research in the field is also part of the work, and Desire has a sign to hang in the storefront: Gone to “meet / a man about a verb.” What I like about these poems, these threshold studies, is that they understand and optimize the breakthrough of sentience, when “the vacuum / inside you breaks—you can finally / hear the lubdub without the interfering music // of rumination.”

—Brian Blanchfield, author of A Several World and Proxies

I can’t think of many contemporary poets who have so inventively taken up the tools Jack Spicer left lying around for us, but in the field Robert Andrew Perez reminds us that poems can be games, can be riddles; that a book of poetry can read like a book of activities (“fill this box with stars”). But these poems are after the Beatles, after disco, after hip-hop and after grunge, after reality TV, after feminism, after psychedelia, after queer theory, after #YOLO, after AIDS. They are more Ovidian than Spicer was—"the void dissembles increments of blue / at itself”—and more trippy. They are deeply Californian poems, but you can take them with you anywhere: they are built to travel, sturdy and light. They let you watch them dancing in the bedroom, and napping on the beach. They’re both volatile and steady at the wheel, how does he do that? They are curious and fearless: “What is dark matter?  // What does dark matter?"

—Chris Nealon, author of Heteronomy

the field is possessed of an exquisite range. These poems feel like interrogations on the very element of poetry, offering a variety of ways in which it can be made manifest. It's a voice strung out past the scale of glamour as in the writing of Rene Ricard or Gary Indiana's few precious poems. Also present is a tighter fitting recurring measure that brings back shades of Gertrude Stein and her attendant undertow. You don't really have to read the field in the traditional sense. You simply fall into it and the voice rings back. I think there are rocks in my heart that only Robert's voice can dissolve.

—Cedar Sigo, author of Language Arts

the field marks liminal borders threatening to enlarge into “states”. Thus, the logic of hypnopompia haunts, even overdetermines, the series of poems titled “hypnagogia logia,” conjuring the song of the goat (who, like Ophelia, cannot sing). the field locates itself somewhere between the worlds of Hannah Weiner and John Berryman where the fitful dreams of freedom remain entangled in a nightmarish “forest of mirrors.” Under multiplying erasures—band, noun, novel, metaphor, etc.—and the multiplication of hes—desire collapses back into the world as such: “elegy is an elegy of elegy.” In such a world there is only the possibility of a “hand” pulling oneself across the chasm—the grave—of generalized, encrypted dissociation.

—Tyrone Williams, author of Howell

Perez’s poetic approach takes off more than formal garb: it combusts.

—Zach Savich, author of The Orchard Green and Every Color

from Colorado Review

Perez plays desire and its contingent emotions—ecstasy, obsession, anxiety—off of one another in this intimate debut collection, a lyrical portrait of 21st-century love, lovers, and loving.

—Publishers Weekly