How to Maintain Eye Contact by Robert Wood Lynn

Set in three sections, Robert Wood Lynn explores interior uncertainty, interpersonal uncertainty and uncertainty at a larger scale. These narrative poems, influenced by storytelling traditions, find themselves at the nexus of the intimate and the humorous, as well as the absurd and the tragic. These poems examine isolation and grief in their many forms—through heartbreak or the death of loved ones, or show us the world looking back at itself after it ends.

Robert Wood Lynn is the author of How to Maintain Eye Contact (Button Poetry 2023), runner-up in the 2020 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest, and Mothman Apologia (Yale University Press 2022), selected by Rae Armantrout as the winner of the 2021 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. His poems have recently appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Narrative Magazine, Shenandoah, The Southern Review and other journals. He splits his time between Brooklyn, New York and Rockbridge County, Virginia.