Robyn Schiff is the author of three previous poetry collections, Worth, Revolver, and A Woman of Property, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The recipient of the 2023 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, she is a Professor at Emory University, and co-edits Canarium Books.
Praise for Information Desk: “There is quiet humor, alongside a whiff of defiance, in Information Desk’s subtitle: 'An Epic.' An epic poem, of course, calls to mind the Greeks, the Romans, all those illustrious examples—The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, etc. The journey portrayed in Information Desk may initially appear to be more inward, but it’s no less transformative . . . Schiff turns the oft-forgotten worker behind the counter into an opportunity to ask deeper questions about the historical relationship between creativity and economics . . . Who says that the life of the woman behind the counter is not equally adventurous as an epic hero’s?” —Poetry Foundation “Schiff’s attention to class and cultural formation [...] is part of a welcome return of class-based discourses to the world of American poetry . . . ranging in intellect, gorgeously slow in its development of thought and feeling . . . [Information Desk] is so faithful to itself, so admirably assured in how it presents us its information.” —Preposition Magazine “Ecstatic, propulsive, and novelistic, Robyn Schiff’s Information Desk is a tour-de-force epic on the intricate structures of knowledge, aesthetics, and labor. Astonishingly sibylline with her syllabic constraints, Schiff is one of our most formally brilliant poets writing in American letters today.” —Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings