Ridiculous Light
Valencia Robin

2018 Lexi Rudnisky First Book Prize Winner

Finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award

In Ridiculous Light, Valencia Robin captures the everyday and the ecstatic in a voice all her own. Through poems that live at the intersection of history and experience, she captures the joys and tumult of being alive. She is a storyteller of the first order, a documenter not just of memories but of how we remember.

“In these memorable poems, Valencia Robin serves up a brash, blistering narrative that is impossible to turn away from. . . . Ridiculous Light illuminates in utterly lyrical and necessary ways.”
—Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art

“In Ridiculous Light, Valencia Robin transforms memories of family, Milwaukee, and her post-divorce reckoning into poetry that underscores the lyric's distinctive power to illuminate the contours of a Black woman’s life.”
—John Keene, author of Counternarratives

Valencia Robin is the author of Lost Cities (August 2025) and Ridiculous Light, which won the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and was named one of Library Journal’s best poetry books of 2019. A recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, her poems have appeared in numerous places including The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Poetry Daily, Poetry Unbound Podcast and The Virginia Quarterly Review, which awarded her the Emily Clark Balch Prize. A painter as well as a poet, Robin has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia and an MFA in Art & Design from the University of Michigan. She currently teaches at East Tennessee State University.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-496-6 / 56 pages / Poetry