reviewed on October 16, 2025

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As its title suggests, and as a familiar epigraph from Elizabeth Bishop reiterates, Valencia Robin’s sophomore collection takes as its central concern various forms of loss and belatedness, mourning "two cities, lovely ones" from which Robin has moved away and loved ones whom she will never see again. 

 

Lost Cities is an elegy for irretrievable histories, those lost in the scatterings and dispersals of contemporary life.

 

For Robin, those losses are attributable in large part to the bureaucratic capitalism in which contemporary life takes place, a system within which one moves through enabling yet expunging institutions into more or less “managed” or “bourgeois” lifestyles.  Lost Cities reads—in a good way—like a LinkedIn profile, replete with corporate VPs and academic CVs, with staff meetings and e-mails and MFA workshops at UVA.

 

Yet as Robin matriculates through forms of education both formal and informal, she comes to appreciate in new and immediate ways the importance of what she has lost, as one can appreciate those losses only after they become losses.  Lost Cities names and celebrates its dead, establishing an ambition “to climb on top of Uncle Henry’s head stone,” as Robin writes in the poem “Mattie,” “and point to our dead, to call each name / while eating a handful of grapes.”

 

That poem is one of several ars poeticae in the book, including the two poems with which Lost Cities concludes.  In the second, “Ars Poetica,” Robin writes that she “woke up singing / my favorite song as a kid,” while in the first, “In the future,” she pledges in second-person address that “you will finally write a poem / beyond the limits of where you usually work.” 

 

Together, these two poems theorize respectively the limitations and possibilities of Robin’s poetics. 

 

Lost Cities is far from a child’s favorite song, and far from childish, but the poems here are tidy situational lyrics in which threads of connection are pulled tight, much as the work was in Robin’s debut, Ridiculous Light (Persea, 2018).  The first poem in the book, for instance, “First Walk of the New Year,” opens with a dog “jumping one, two, three stumps in a row, / his boy is too busy scrolling to notice.”  By poem’s end that image becomes a metaphor: “as if my heart was the kid on the phone / and not the little dog.”  Sometimes, the cinched-bow endings work by means of puns, as when “Atlantis” concludes with “that withering guitar shipwrecking us” or when a poem titled “Zoom” works its way to a culminating slow-dance described as “the kind of technology / that takes millions of years to perfect.”  I often teach Robin’s work for her mastery of set-up and call-back, but some of the poems in Lost Cities do connect their dots a little too neatly. 

 

The book is better when it moves away from the poetics that characterized Ridiculous Light, which was nonetheless a strong first collection.  In poems like “Sometimes life feels like daytime TV,” and “Hi,” Robin lets in a formal and ethical wildness which disrupts what might otherwise become an over-tidiness.  In the former, the banality of writer’s block opens onto a nigh vertiginous ecological impasse:

 

not that I don’t like the convenience of toothpaste,

of salmon already filleted in a vacuum-packed pouch,

of disposable razors and individually packaged strawberry yogurt

—of throwing it all away whenever I feel like it.  And to think—just that,

the mountains and mountains of trash—in the ocean, dumped

where we can’t see it—Black and brown people living around it 

like company towns, working it like a nine to five […]

 

In the latter, an encounter with a neighborhood homeless man occasions pointed and refreshingly frank self-critique:

 

He says Hi.  So, what can I do?  I say Hi.

Which means the next time I see him I have to

say Hi.

 

Both poems interrupt—by catalog and interrogation, respectively—the formal thread that might cinch their beginnings to their ends, all while de-centering the lyric subject in somewhat provocative ways.  These and other poems in Lost Cities push "beyond the limits" of where Robin has usually worked, and in their greater riskiness comes greater reward.  In these poems, Robin is pursuing something new, something—at the risk of a tech-culture cliché—boldly disruptive.

 

Since Ridiculous Light, Robin has been a poet to watch, and if Lost Cities sometimes resembles that debut too closely there are nonetheless far worse source texts from which to work.  The book is a polished second collection, elegiac yet tender, oriented toward the past while refusing to give up on the future it ends—as in “In the future,”—by imagining into existence.