Part detective novel, part cinematic saga, part street-smart narrative, the poems in The Life of a Hunter form a document of expedition that couples individual discovery with communal transformation. Michelle Robinson's characters are consigned to particular mechanisms of survival to various forms of physical and psychological evolutions--as a reaction to their search for an acceptable spiritual condition. The multiple identities of her pressured characters are susceptible to physical transformations that provide “a brief jolt of anesthesia, / instead of the cold tenderness of interruption.” Robinson uses the culture of film and fiction as an analogy for the world just out of reach and the world already at hand; preoccupied with what precision “sounds like,” the figures in her poems respond to the possibility of future change as well as the fact that change is a constant in their lives. “Don't misunderstand. It was the most cynical year of our era / and anything would have been better than to have been asked / to find something beautiful.” Robinson's is a strong young voice, detached and observant yet disturbingly present.
