Robbi Nester holds an MA in English/Creative Writing from Hollins University, an MFA from University of California, Irvine, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from University of California, Irvine.
She has published four books of poetry: a chapbook, Balance (White Violet, 2012), and three collections: A Likely Story (Moon Tide, 2014), Other-Wise (Kelsey, 2017), and Narrow Bridge (Main Street Rag, 2019). She has also edited three ekphrastic anthologies: one, in print, and the others online. These are The Liberal Media Made Me Do It! (Nine Toes, 2014), Over the Moon: Birds, Beasts, and Trees ( 2017) and The Plague Papers (2021), both published as special issues of the journal Poemeleon, and available in their online archive.
She spent over 30 years teaching composition, literature, and a smidgen of Creative Writing as an adjunct in various colleges and universities and was listed at Who’s Who in the West. Now she curates and hosts two monthly Zoom readings.
Her poems have been honored by being included in several ekphrastic exhibits, and one was a finalist several years ago at Best of Net. She is adept at writing to prompts, and her poems have won prizes at several publications and have been chosen as Editors Choice at a few as well. One of her poems received Honorable Mention at the Wick Poetry Prize, and she has been the featured poet at a number of publications.
She is an elected member of the Academy of American Poets.
Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson
Robbi Nester is one of those rare writers who takes you inside her head and her life and you don’t want to leave. She thinks what you’re thinking and her family becomes your family. Although we come from different backgrounds and parts of the country, I can relate to Robbi
‘in your lovely city you can weep.”
Sarah Sarai, “The Quiet Softness”
Maybe that’s what makes it home, a place
where you can weep, laying your heavy head
down in your arms and just letting go. I did enough
of that in the brick row house in Philadelphia
where I grew up, balanced on the scorching
radiator, bony as a starving horse, wishing
I were somewhere else, seeing without
seeing the same blank corner of the block,
parked cars and delivery vans, bringing us
warm pies and packages, bottles of milk,
newspapers fallen into the garden in a heap.
I left that place behind decades ago. Why then
when I saw old photos of the Bushrod library
across the street, the old newsstand on the corner
where the holocaust survivors gathered to speak
their mamaloschen, read Yiddish newspapers,
Tarkin playground, where I’d ice skate in winter,
run through the sprinklers in the summer heat,
I felt a tug, drawing me back to a place that isn’t
there now, people who have died or gone away—
most of whom I never thought about before now?
Home isn’t in the tears I shed there or in the time
I spent living in that house, as a child, a teenager,
when I was taking it all in, gathering a harvest
that would last a lifetime. What would I tell
that crying child? I’d say to store it all, grief’s
golden grain, to remember, set it to rise
in a warm corner. That will be your home.
Published in MacQueen’s Quinterly
When I was six, my mother took me downtown
to see a movie. We wore white gloves and petticoats.
I had a purse all to myself, for chewing gum, a few
coins for the snack stand, displaying bright boxes
of Good N’Plenty and Sweet Tarts in glass cases.
This theater wasn’t like the Benner, down the street,
where we kids would toss our popcorn at the screen,
boo when the film broke, or the projectionist
put in the wrong reel. Downtown, my mother and I
climbed up to the mezzanine like queens, in our
rustling skirts, clutching patent leather purses,
studying the murals on the walls. When the place
went dark, I traced the path of light-motes from
projector to the screen, where ten-foot faces glowed.
The soundtrack boomed and echoed, caught us
in its skein of narrative, until the lights came up.
When I was a child, my parents packed me in the
back seat as though I were an oddly-fashioned
suitcase, feet tucked up, so they could put the cooler
on the floorboard, filled with salad and soggy roast beef
sandwiches, thermos of fuchsia bug juice, mixture of
every frozen concentrate, from grape to guava, sweeter
than any real fruit ought to be. Sometimes I’d get car sick
in a North Jersey ditch, or have to pee in a field of black-eyed
Susans, staring as I missed the ground and tinkled in my shoe.
And best of all, the coming home, being lifted from the cave
of the back seat and carried to my room.
On Sundays in Pennypack Park, I’d go on picnics
with my parents. It was the only time I spent
near trees. They were blighted, infested
with the nests of gypsy moths strung
like hammocks between the branches.
It was the creek I really loved, water
thick with soap bubbles, windows
into another world, pouring out of pipes
under the highway bridge. Blue and purple
dragonflies bigger than my hand
buzzed the surface, snapping at mosquito
larvae and small fish. A predator myself,
I’d follow shadows by the rocks, schools
of sunfish, minnows, tadpoles, sometimes
catfish in the deeper water by the falls.
I longed to catch them in my green net,
ready to grab one with my hands, braving
knife-sharp barbels, but I never could.
The blue bucket swung from my arm,
full of fat pollywogs. Lunch was the least
of it, the grass singing under my feet
the circle of trees, leaning in like ancestors.
Previously published in Live Encounters
Who was that woman, wizened as a Winesap
too long in the bowl, in her dowdy shirtwaist
and old lady shoes? Her long hair, bound up
in a bun, curled tight in the dark nest of her hair
like a sleeping field mouse in a tuft of grass.
She never answered questions about her life.
Where she was born was no one’s business
but her own. But I wanted to know where
we all came from, besides from underneath
our mothers’ skirts, that other place no one
ever talked about. What oceans had she sailed?
Who came with her? Or was she alone?
Most storytellers start with other stories,
shadows of the actual. Why did her in laws
spurn her and the children after her first
husband’s death? We can speculate, spin
elaborate narratives. But do we ever really
know our ancestors, even if we’re living
in their houses, sitting in their chairs,
staring at their portraits on the wall?
Previously published at The Schuylkill Valley Journal
