In her latest poetry collection, Lost Cities, Valencia Robin brings the past to the present for her readers and inverts the centers of society to bring those who society marginalizes into the spotlight. With a voice that is insightful, piercing, and invitingly playful, Robin shows her readers both the tolls American life takes on a body and the joys one has from making some form of connection—whether with another person, through a memory, or through a speaker’s own realization.
Lost Cities is a vivid study of how love, isolation, time, and memory work together to create a full emotional experience—even if those experiences are painful. Below, Robin and I discuss how she navigates emotion, time, and image as a poet writing through cross-country moves, racial protests, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a love for Star Trek.
RS Deeren
Much of Lost Cities puts a spotlight on people who have been marginalized by society. “Ask Your Grandmother” explains the history of medical discrimination against women. “The Afro” serves as a vivid image of an “all-white [department’s]” refusal to accept a Black woman with natural hair in the workplace. These images, these moments, are so vividly rendered and emotionally fraught. During your revision process, what goes into balancing emotion with imagery?
Valencia Robin
Imagery and emotion go hand in hand, which is to say, conveying emotion begins with connecting that emotion to a tangible image. This goes back to T. S. Eliot’s objective correlative, which is really just a reminder to “show don’t tell.” If you want readers to feel what you’re feeling, you have to find an object or scene, something concrete, that allows them to connect to the poem on a visceral level. “Ask Your Grandmother” and “The Afro” were both inspired by situations that revolve around the sort of everyday sexism and racism that’s both common and hidden. “Ask Your Grandmother” tells the story of my friend’s grandmother, a white woman whose doctor refused to perform a tubal ligation until she’d had six children, even though she and her husband struggled financially and she suffered from severe depression. That story blew me away because I had no idea how difficult it once was for women to get their tubes tied. But I did know the other side of the coin, that thousands of Black and brown women were sterilized against their will throughout the twentieth century—people such as the famed voting rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer. Putting those two stories together in the same poem was really satisfying.
“The Afro” came out of my own experience as a young, Black professional and while that was years ago, in some professions, African American women still have to navigate that kind of cultural bias. Anyway, the question for me when writing and revising both those poems was how to help readers feel what I felt. And, of course, one’s initial reaction is to want to get on a soap box. But the key is to find an image, a word-picture that pulls readers in emotionally. I tell my students to imagine a scene in a film. Movie characters don’t typically tell us what they’re feeling; they show us through their actions.
RS Deeren
There are many poems here that give readers a glimpse at types of love. In “First Walk of the New Year,” the speaker contemplates her own heart, likening it to an oblivious boy lost in the scroll of his phone and the happy dog at the end of a leash, hopping between tree stumps. In the elegy “Song,” love is more an unanswered longing, stating, “love and the moment after,/longing carrying us to some other country.” What role does love have in this collection?
Valencia Robin
The last poem in the book, “Ars Poetica,” was inspired by Earth, Wind and Fire’s, “All About Love,” and I’d like to think that’s true—that the book is all about love. Both those poems as well as others were written during the COVID pandemic, a time when I was not only single but quite isolated socially. Even before the shutdown, I was hungry for community if only because I’d moved from Ann Arbor, where I’d spent most of my life, to Charlottesville, where I’d come to study poetry at the University of Virginia and where I eventually found work. So, on the one hand, I was missing all my old friends and once grad school ended, I was missing all my new friends. I’m an introvert, so I probably managed better than most during the shutdown, but being both single and without a community was a lot. The poems definitely reflect that. Many of the speakers in the book are searching for something—love, community, a place to land, i.e. work—so there’s a lot of uncertainty, too, all of which ties the poems together. Interestingly, it wasn’t until I stumbled on the title, Lost Cities, that I could see that.
RS Deeren
Lost Cities is a powerhouse of highlighting the ebb and flow of the personal and universal within a lyric moment. This is not to say that these poems “can mean anything to anyone.” Rather, these poems create layers of understanding stemming from intimate moments. Particularly, “Help” begins at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, and carries its readers from the idea of racism down to the image of the “resentful Black faces” of a school field trip, then to the speaker’s memories of herself rolling her eyes when she was on the same tour. When you’re writing, how often do you start with the intimate and then expand? How often do you do the opposite?
Valencia Robin
I always begin with the intimate—with some personal experience or insight. My first visit to Monticello was actually as a graduate student studying poetry at the University of Virginia. However, I experienced so many other attempts at whitewashing US history as a kid that I knew exactly what those Black high schoolers must have been feeling. I really didn’t want to write a poem about Monticello or Jefferson; great poems on that topic have already been written. Just as importantly, I didn’t want to give any more energy to things like Monticello in general. That’s why I began “Help” with the words “So many distractions,” which is a nod to a quote by Toni Morrison and the fact that there are so many other things that I—and, I’m sure, Black people in general—would rather be doing than fighting racism. And yet, I couldn’t get those kids’ faces out of my head. I was surprised when the poem took me back to my childhood and doubly surprised to look back at my childhood and see all the ways I’d pushed back against my “miseducation.” Which I never would have realized if I hadn’t written that poem.
RS Deeren
Many of these poems carry rage; violence looms over some speakers but they never feel simply emotional. Poems like “Letter to Charlottesville” show a speaker claiming a city rooted in racial violence as her own, wonderfully defiant, claiming the city’s hills for herself. When do you know a poem has found a good use for these emotions?
Valencia Robin
I think that when writing about highly emotional events like what happened in Charlottesville, the initial response is to rail and scream or, at the very least, to preach. But, again, I know that my best shot at pulling the reader in and keeping them there is through imagery, through creating a scene or a situation, something that they can connect to on an emotional level. In terms of “Letter to Charlottesville” first and foremost, I wanted to avoid conflating my experience with what the counter protestors experienced. Or what the mother of Heather Heyer, the young woman who was killed, experienced. I wasn’t at the protest. And for that reason, I didn’t even know what there was for me to say. And yet I felt compelled to write about that day—which makes sense. I’m a poet and writing poems is often how I figure out what I’m feeling. The endings to my poems usually come fairly quickly, but not for that poem. In fact, I didn’t discover the ending until I left Charlottesville and moved to Tennessee. Looking back, it probably helped to have some distance.
RS Deeren
The largest section of Lost Cites is the “Lt. Uhura, Communications Officer, Star Trek” series. Told as a sequence of episodes of the show, each part highlights an idealized world juxtaposed with the realities of contemporary US life. There is a balance of hope and grief within this section; the speaker comments on her desire to speak beyond the role of her job (and the role of her character) while also critiquing how an on-screen kiss between a white man and Black woman can’t erase the names of so many Black victims of police brutality. Can you expand on this balancing act?
Valencia Robin
I have a thing for space movies and that began with Star Trek and Uhura. I wrote the first “episode” of the Uhura sequence in grad school and while I’d hoped to turn it into a series back then, I quickly ran out of steam. I rediscovered the poem as I was finishing Lost Cities and decided to try again. This time I happened to find a long interview online with Nichelle Nichols, the actor who played Uhura. Hearing her stories of what was happening behind the scenes gave me a lot more material. For instance, one of Uhura’s biggest fans was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who convinced Nichelle Nichols to stay in the role because it was such a positive portrayal of African Americans. I quickly realized that if I combined the Uhura character with the life of Nichelle Nichols, I could still play with all those space movie tropes while also unpacking a lot of interesting history. I didn’t expect the section that you’re pointing to—the kiss between Uhura and Captain Kirk, the first interracial kiss on TV—to end in such a serious and somber place. I think a big part of the balancing act in the Uhura sequence in general was simply letting those kinds of surprises happen.
RS Deeren
One of the many strengths of Lost Cities is the poems that either highlight the individual fixed in place by social systems—such as gender, race, or class—or the individual’s attempts to navigate these systems. In “Poem for the Guy Down the Street,” the speaker sees the impact of working-class life on the body of a taxi driver who is “thirty if that,/yet something already Sisyphean/about him, forever hunched.” Maybe an unfair question, but how much are these poems a direct response to social systems that attempt to marginalize an individual?
Valencia Robin
One of the reasons my neighbor left such an impression on me was because I grew up working-class, because I was the first professional in my family. An earlier version of that poem went in a totally different direction, had a totally different premise, which imagined the neighbor as a college student. That is, my idea of a better life for him was to make him middle-class. But something about that bugged me and I realized what it was. That man could take apart an engine and put it back together. Why did he need a college degree to make a decent living? And yet that particular insight didn’t occur to me until after I’d rewritten the poem. I’ve heard other poets say that their poems are often smarter than they are—I agree.
RS Deeren
Time moves through these poems both as a way to show change and also as a way to anchor the present to the past. “Poetry” has the images of the speaker’s mother’s and grandmother’s keys “to every home I’ve ever had” as a metaphor for memory. “Gone Hour,” too, brings a memory into the present. In a previous interview, you mention you are not someone who thinks a lot about place, but what are your thoughts on time and how it impacts your work?
Valencia Robin
Memory is a major source of inspiration for me. Not that our memories are always accurate and not that I don’t fictionalize my poems when necessary; in fact, some poems come completely from my imagination. What’s important to me isn’t to capture an experience so much as the emotional truth of an experience. In general, my poems often connect the private to the public and the past to the present and, in that sense, are a kind of frame—I hope, for seeing history through a different lens.
RS Deeren
There are many surprises throughout Lost Cities; I found myself startled by an image here, a satisfying enjambment there. The couplets in “Woke” read like a note in a diary; they pass quickly. Then, as the speaker says, “the universe blinks” and the poem changes course. When drafting, how often are you surprised by the direction a poem takes? Is it common for a poem to become something different than what you thought it would be?
Valencia Robin
I’ve learned to always let the poem go where it wants to go, that there’s nothing to be gained by trying to stick with my initial impulse. Certainly, nothing I can think of is ever as interesting or surprising as where a poem takes me. A big part of being an artist is learning to trust your intuition, to be willing to go down the rabbit hole. My poems routinely veer off into unexpected directions and I’m always thankful when they do.
POETRY
Lost Cities: Poems
Valencia Robin
Persea Books
Published August 5, 2025
