“This is love that guts you, that you yourself gut open, "the inside of your rib cage/ your heart and intestines/ jeweled squid/ alive and threatening." A love that speaks to its own heart and knows, "I'm afraid to be with her and just her." It's a love that expends itself on several affairs over the course of these poems, but which ultimately returns to declare, in "Self Love," that "I will be your greatest love story. . .there is so much joy in relearning."
--Heidi Czerwiec, author of Fluid States and Conjoining (part of which appeared as A Is For A-ké with Dancing Girl Press.)
To spend your time with “Confessions of a Love Addict” is to spend your time exploring the sensory spectrum of love, lust, loneliness and all afflictions in between. Smith makes magic with her poetry, turning familiar feelings into electrifying revelations, all while creating a landscape of language where no two words strike the same chord, but when coupled, they bring a reader to their knees.
(ALSO IM JUST OBSESSED WITH HER!!!!!)
~Marina Mularz author of Welcome to Freedom Point
Robin Smith’s Confessions of a Love Addict is aptly titled: it’s a colorful, shimmering parade through myriad intimacies that glitter like so many “bouquets of pink star balloons and cherry blossoms.” The seventeen poems in this collection are so bursting with sensuous experience that they practically hum on the page in a dizzying, often drunken, buzz. What’s particularly delightful about these poems is the fluidity and surprise with which they transform their subjects. There’s an underlying sense of the magical real whereby a “shower curtain / covered in black and yellow / stars and moons” moves “over us” to become actual stars and moons, or where the speaker’s transformed by a kiss and sees her “body shimmer / mantis shrimp / and parrot fish.” The ease with which Smith bends these fantastic images around the otherwise recognizable—even mundane—rhythms of love and romance are a testament to her prowess.
Like most addictions, however, beneath the dopamine-fueled excitement is a quieter, more troubling thread of insecurity, vulnerability, and painful difference. In several poems, the speaker’s desire for both men and women and its attendant complications sees her struggle. She seems to oscillate between defiantly rejecting the society than shuns her queerness and feeling nonetheless displaced by her desire. This tension provides a much-needed layer of complexity to some poems that are so airy they risk lifting off the page entirely. It grounds these poems in a world that’s real, despite the poet’s enchanted transformations of so many everyday things.
Above all, these poems are unapologetic and in their ardor risk more than embarrassment—they risk real loss and pain. But the world transformed here is so sparkling, enticing, and beautifully strange that it’s very much worth the risk.
~Dr. Cody Deitz, Author of Pressed Against all that Nothing
Smith’s Confessions of a Love Addict is a journey through multiple relationships and a speaker learning to love herself outside of being with others. It’s a lesson that many of us need to learn regardless of gender, sexuality, etc. The poems are rife with a feminine touch and many speak to the consequences of being queer in a town that is destined to shame you or not support such public displays of affection. Still, the love persists and through each poem in this chapbook, the speaker’s self-love becomes more and more self-evident.
Jackie Rachel, MFA in Poetry Riverside California
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Robin Smith is a femme, queer, writer & scholar originally from Northern California, based in North Dakota. Robin is the author of the chapbook “Confessions of a Love Addict” (Dancing Girl Press, 2021). And the full length collection Love Glut (Rebel Satori Press, 2022). She is also winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Katherine B. Tiffany Award, among others. Her work has appeared in By & By poetry review, Aji Literary Magazine, Visual Artists Collective, Westwind, Legendary Review, and PACIFICReview, among many others. Her work has also been featured in anthologies such as Bliss and Drawn to Comics. She was the lead poetry editor for the Northridge Review, and coedits Voicemail Poems. Robin Smith was the judge of the 2019 Rachel Sherman award for up and coming poets. She received her B.A and M.A in Creative Writing (poetry) from California State Northridge and is currently attending the University of North Dakota where she is pursuing her Doctorate in Creative Writing. Her major fields include Post-1945 American literature (fiction with an emphasis on identity) and Contemporary Lyric Poetry. Robin currently teaches Writing Composition for the Launch program at Lake Region State College in Grand Forks, North Dakota. She also works with pre-k children at Grand Forks Montessori Academy
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While You Were Missing Me
I booked flights to Morocco,
Prague, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam,
Norway, and Barcelona.
I gave two new kittens a home
and named them Keats and Rilke.
I showered in hot water,
and left my hair ties and gold earrings
wherever I damned wanted to
without fear of your rage,
without having to huddle
in a locked bathroom
for an hour crying
while you slammed the door
with your fist.
I spent a night in a beautiful hotel
with an even more beautiful girl.
Who moved her perfect body against mine
like electricity, like firecrackers, like smoke.
I bought Aussie Shampoo, the kind that smells
like bubblegum and makes my hair full.
I drank more than one beer at dinner,
I brought men to their knees
as I undressed.
I slept alone most nights
and never once felt lonely.
I let nosey happiness
burrow her way back
into my ribcage.
I stopped writing love poems for you,
and wrote them for myself.
While you were missing me
I put roses in clear water
and felt the warmth of their velvet petals
as they set my bedroom on fire.