Backyard Paleontology

Robin Gow
ISBN: 978-1-949099-18-8
38 pages


This is a taut collection brimming with questions. As poet-paleontologist, Robin Gow gets their hands dirty. These poems dig, unearth, excavate, recover, and reveal. Imbued with the wide-eyed curiosity of childhood, Backyard Paleontology offers a snapshot of a poet in mid-discovery. In one of many clarion moments, the poet writes: "This is how I want to be found."

— Jan-Henry Gray, author of Documents

Cover by Steve White

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Sample poem from Backyard Paleontology:


Plateosaurs

1. Bones, like words, are easily misread. Broad lizard. Flat lizard. 2. The Triassic was computer-screen wide. Flicking in the foreground without a naming. What beautiful word will another creature use to name our history-scape. 3. We lay down in the carved-out earth beside the contorted bones of the dinosaur. His fingers splayed out as if he were trying to grasp a rustling — as if there were still foliage to be torn apart. 4. My brother and I mimic his pose. We try to see the bones inside each other by staring hard and deep. 5. The bones lurk like sharks beneath tides of skin. 6. We ask the dinosaur how he died and the bones don't move and so we have to dig them up and my brother uses a plastic shovel and I use a spoon. We have to be gentle. 7. I know that it isn't true but I want to imagine the dinosaur arranging his bones himself — laying down gracefully and declaring this is how I want to be found. 8. After working all night in the yard, I tell my brother This is how I want to be found as I lie on the floor of my bedroom two floors up in our old farm house that winces with each gust of wind. He tells me I don't want to ever be found.
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Robin Gow is a trans poet and young adult author from rural Pennsylvania. They are the author of Our Lady of Perpetual Degeneracy (Tolsun Books 2020) and the chapbook Honeysuckle (Finishing Line Press 2019). Their first young adult novel, A Million Quiet Revolutions is forthcoming March 2022 with FSG Books for Young Readers. Gow's poetry has recently been published in POETRY, Southampton Review, and Yemassee. Gow received their MFA from Adelphi University where they were also an adjunct instructor. Gow is a managing editor at The Nasiona and the assistant editor at large at Doubleback Books. They live in Allentown Pennsylvania with their queer family and two pug dogs and work at Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center.