Asked What Has Changed

"Just as William Blake was able to descry an entire world in a kernel of sand, Roberson is ever alert to affinities between the small and the vast, the fleeting and the cosmic."—James Gibbons, Hyperallergic

"Ed Roberson's Asked What Has Changed answers this question with characteristically keen observations and dancing syntax. From his current vantage point, twelve stories above Lake Michigan and eight decades into an African American life, Roberson's view encompasses what is both the mark of his apartment's 'luxury' status and the 'source of Chicago's smelly tap water.' Another breathtaking contribution to his inquiry into how black aesthetics can sharpen our understanding of local and global ecosystems, this work teaches us not simply to look, but to see."—Evie Shockley, author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry

"Ed Roberson new book stands tall here as has his whole body of meditative, subtle poetry many years. Roberson is one of our great under-sung American poetic masters with a complex poetry of humanity, history, witness, playfully skewed syntax, ecological gnosis and a crystalline vison of evolutionary possibilities. We need this book always, and right now. Bravo."—Anne Waldman, author of Trickster Feminism

"In Asked What Has Changed, Ed Roberson sits by the window of his high-rise , knowing that "we might not be fast eno ugh/to out distance events ," and sees what was and 'wasn't here before the hurricane.' He is a witness to the terrible beauty of our irreversible changing world."—John Yau, Recipient of the 2018 Jackson Prize in Poetry