The Lesser Fields

"In The Lesser Fields, Rob Schlegel takes a lit match to the surfaces of his words in an act of poetic arson. Thus the poet wanders a landscape whose commonplace markers-fish, sea, trees, birds-are made disquietingly strange: 'Before my mind / Can shape it, presence / Finishes a thought in my fingers.' The natural world of language manifests with an incendiary beauty at once tender and dangerous, reckless and precise. This poetry burns subtly, but the heat is unmistakable." -- Elizabeth Robinson