Omitting All That Is Usually Said

Robin Caton is the author of The Color of Dusk. Her poems have appeared in various journals including Generator, Columbia Poetry Review, and 6ix, and her short story “B, Longing” is included in the fabulist fiction collection, Paraspheres. Caton is a senior instructor at Dharma College in Berkeley, and she lives in Walnut Creek, California.

“In Omitting All That is Usually Said, Caton, recreates the anatomy of perception, with its ‘folly of love’ as language, narrating passages of consciousness where ‘light is a gaze’ that opens out into a world of metaphoric rhythms. Through a series of dynamic interactions, torn detours and sequences, and ‘lateral fictions’ between an omniscient observer, a protagonist on a train, and windows that carry the ‘intimate air’ of landscapes, Caton demonstrates a painter’s ability to create a ‘lucid invention’ you’ll want to read again and again. Imagine a story, en media res, full of subtext and vision play––archives of indefinite time made for our ‘starved minds’ like ‘insects . . . in stuttering debate.’ This magical collection invites Mallarmé’s declaration that ‘Every soul is a melody to be renewed.’”