EQUIPMENT FOR LIVING

A brilliant, illuminating criticism of why we turn to art—specifically to poetry and popular music, and how they serve as essential tools to understanding life.

A brilliant, illuminating criticism of why we turn to art—specifically to poetry and popular music, and how they serve as essential tools to understanding life. How can art, specifically poetry and popular music, help us make sense of the world? With the same intelligence that animates his poetry, Michael Robbins addresses this weighty question while contemplating the idea of how strange it is that we need art at all. Ranging from Prince to Def Leppard, Lucille Clifton to Frederick Seidel, Robbins’s mastery of poetry and popular music shines
in Equipment for Living. His singular ability to illustrate points with seemingly disparate examples (Friedrich Kittler and Taylor Swift, to W.B. Yeats and Anna Kendrick’s “Cups”) will change the way you listen to music and read poetry.
Michael Robbins’s poetry and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Harper’s, and many other publications.