Something Like a River

"The poems in Something Like a River surprise the senses. In this collection, Roberta revisits the rivers of her youth in New York, contrasting them with the landscapes of her adult life in the West. Roberta's similes jump off the page: '[ice]bergs melt like candles'; her lists. 'forget our crass bosses, investment failures, / losing scratch ticket...' are short stories in themselves, and her details, 'the sickle tongues of hummingbirds', almost revelations. But most remarkable are some of her endings, which astonished me." Jana Harris, author of We Never Speak of It