The Youngest Butcher in Illinois

Poetry. "Here is some sorcery, not necessarily explicable. Here is the invisible; Robert Ostrom traffics in it. The poems of THE YOUNGEST BUTCHER IN ILLIONOIS are some of the most gifted I've ever read. 'We are not safe,' he writes—but nor would we ever, for a moment (here) want to be. There's something oddly shy about the way these poems comport themselves, but the imagination is brazen with yearning. The authority of craft is bracing: the lines are sutured but there are no scars. The dark, passionate, miniature universe Ostrom has composed is seductive and whimsical. This is a new voice—edgy, stricken with attentiveness, soft-spoken, numinous. Take him at his word."—Lucie Brock-Broido