In the dust and blood and water of Red Creek, Margaret Robison poignantly reveals the many hidden lives of her Georgia hometown. She evokes the land and the people there with sharp and complex images: a woman shelling peas as gnats swarm around her “like the past and the future”; a black man who sets down a Mason jar of ice water, droplets running down its side like “tears from an ancient sorrow.” Robison writes as the lost child in her father’s stories, trying to return home. She writes with the searing quality of one whom “history burns when breathed in too quickly, too deeply.” She has breathed in the sweet and the bitter fragrance of her birthplace and breathed out poetry.
—Minnie Bruce Pratt
Poet and author of Crime Against Nature

Red Creek,as Margaret Robison asserts by her title, is A Requiem. Businesses, people, streets, houses, and the surrounding landscape crowd our consciousness with telling detail after detail, falling like fine old dust and silt upon people, buildings, and lives in a richly sad nostalgia. And love, one must add, love. Robison achieves the fine sense of old affections going away and lost in Red Creek, a richly fragmented mosaic portrait of a known place and time. It could be bitter. It isnot. It rings true. And yes, “...everything/ is joined by light.”
—Joseph Langlund
Poet and author of Anybody's Song

In Robison’s Red Creek, we enter not only a site but also the strangeness and longing behind it, the shadow that always moves with any illuminated thing.
—Stephen Corey
Poet and Associate Editor of the Georgia Review