When the best restaurant in Charleston
Puts chocolate in the pecan pie,

You know you're in deep trouble,
But it doesn't stop there,

It doesn't stop anywhere.

                                 from 'Melt Down' by Robert Rehder

In First Things When Robert Rehder views the modern world - our world - with a cool wit. Insights deadly despite a self-deprecating ruefulness spark into view. Rehder's poems inhabit the invented, rootless places that modern society creates: supermarkets, airports and parking garages; the illusory communities of celebrity and the digital universe: 'Instead of friends you have email'. Rehder's humour acknowledges his complicity and skewers the fake and the absurd.

The small Swiss village of Corminboeuf where the poet lives is both a comic and mythic location for a life. Throughout the collection, luminous, poignant poems return us to a larger world that sustains and, precariously, endures: the fading splendour of Venice, a culture we are in danger of discarding, and a series of poems on the mysterious, transforming power of snow. These are poems about everyday things, remembering and forgetting, movies, coffee mugs and the beauty of the natural world.



'His wit has a forensic edge: he is always intelligent but shatters common expectation... The impression the reader gets is of an intellectual but domestic incandescence... There is no substitute for reading Rehder over and over again - the poems are too clear to be understood at once. And they shine too brightly.' - Peter Porter

'His are chiseled, wonderfully crafted lyrics that infuse the most mundane of incidents with resonance. Rehder contemplates the splendors and miseries of everyday life with an eye to foibles and absurdities, including our own.' - Marjorie Perloff

Cover painting: Frank Stella, Hyena Stomp. 1962 (copyright 2008 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society, New York).