Backlit, poetry by Liz Robbins, Rattle Chapbook Winner, 2025, book review by Mary Beth Hines

Review of “Backlit” by Liz Robbins, Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner, 2025

Liz Robbins’s opening dedication in her award-winning chapbook, “Backlit,” appears centered and alone on an otherwise blank page, as below.


 					for the powerless


Her acknowledgements begin:  “I’m grateful to the sex workers I interviewed and whose stories I researched to inform this chapbook. All the names and likenesses to actual individuals have been changed.”  

And Robbins’s respect for the women whose voices inform these poems continues throughout the collection. I particularly appreciate that because I read and reread the poems amidst the ongoing Epstein file saga. While the initiating circumstances and subsequent physical and sociological surroundings of the “Backlit” sex workers may be different from those of Epstein-circle survivors, I imagine impacts on bodies, futures, psyches, emotions, and mental health are similar. Robbins humanizes and gives powerful expression to the voiceless at a critically important moment.

While the subject can be hard to read about, the poems themselves are lyrical, compelling, and full of feeling and flashes of insight. These are persona poems, and Robbins’s narrators invite readers into their world. I found myself rooting for them and sharing their fantasies of escape. I chose the poem “The Desperate Attract the Using” to illustrate my thoughts. This narrator begins:

“The johns come to me, desperate
for fun, a bit frantic with the naughty
thrill of breaking the law and maybe
my spirit. In disguise, in a black dress
and lipstick, thong underwear I’d never
wear alone, I open my body, driven
toward money, desperate to survive,
like any wild animal. The johns read me
as eager for love, as that’s the advertising,
the song I sing they pay for. I play
scapegoat for the johns, for the whole
city. Haunted families pick the weak
to carry shame...”

Later in the poem, the narrator momentarily escapes into a dream of the future.

“.... Someday, I’ll become 
a librarian, keeping myself hidden, finding
a place within stacks of books. Knowledge
like scripture. Libraries offering sanctuary
like the churches of old. My footfalls
in the stone aisles like anyone’s, like
everyone’s: echoing for a brief time,
then gone.”

I once studied with a poet who said that craft is important in poetry, but that conveying genuine feeling is more so. Liz Robbins achieves both in this chapbook, all while dealing with a subject that has high stakes for the “desperate” as well as for the “using,” and, by extension, considering our common humanity, for all of us. 

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Liz Robbins’ fourth collection, Night Swimming, won the 2023 Cold Mountain Press Annual Book Contest. Her third, Freaked, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award, judged by Bruce Bond; her second, Play Button, won the Cider Press Review Book Award, judged by Patricia Smith. Her first is Hope, as the World Is a Scorpion Fish (University of Nebraska). She lives in St. Augustine, Florida, where she works as an editor, as well as a poetry screener for Ploughshares.

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Read more book reviews (and poems) from Mary Beth Hines here on Lightwood. Scroll to our Search Button, enter her name and click.

Mary Beth Hines is the author of "Winter at a Summer House" (Kelsay, 2021). A member of the Boiler House Poets Collective, she participates in an annual Assets for Artists workshop residency at the Studios at MASS MoCA. Her most recent work appears in journals such as Presence, RockPaperPoem, and Solstice Literary Magazine as well as in Lightwood. Visit her at www.marybethhines.com