About to Disappear (Shanti Arts, 2025) by Robbi Nester
Comments by Sharon Waller Knutson
Magical and musical are the two words that best describe Robbi Nester’s poetry collection, About to Disappear. Stunning our senses, she showcases her talent for vivid imagery and skillful craftsmanship by painting poetic portraits of people, creatures and landscapes as beautiful as the artists whose work she interprets.
About the book by Robbi Nester
My book, About to Disappear (Shanti Arts, 2025), is an ekphrastic collection with images for many of the poems. Ekphrastic poems respond to other works of art, whether they are other poems, visual art, film, dance, music, or other art form. In this case, all the poems were inspired by visual artworks, many of them famous. I either collaborated with the contemporary artists or the images were in the common domain.
About to Disappear is a poetry collection that explores the limits of ekphrasis; that is, descriptions and reflections on works of art in order to expand their meaning. The book is separated into four sections: Ex Nihilo, Adaptation, Law of Attraction, and Ad Nihilum. The first and final sections-translated as "from nothing, returning to nothing"-act as bookends. Ex Nihilo includes poems about imagination, optics, creation, and and development; while poems in the final section, Ad Nihilum, are about trauma, unmaking, climate change, and catastrophe. Poems in the middle sections are about artistic, psychological, and physical transformations, and natural history and community. Artworks included are from contemporary artists-as well as such artists as Vermeer, Grant Wood, John Singer Sargent, and Edward Hopper.
Praise from other poets:
According to Leonardo da Vinci, 'Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.' However, in Robbi Nester's fabulous new collection, About to Disappear, nothing vanishes. We see poems, art, the poet, and the world. Nester's lyrical conversations with artists as diverse as Joseph Cornell, Robert Rhodes, Beth Moon, Edward Hopper, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Sally Gall, and even da Vinci himself chart new territories for ekphrasis. Indeed, About to Disappear functions like a gallery in which every poem could be on a wall, talking to everything else in the room. In one of her poems to van Gogh, Nester writes, 'I feel blessed just to be here.' I couldn't agree more."
-Dean Rader, professor, University of San Francisco; author of Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly
"'The mind is always brewing something . . . ' begins the mesmerizing collection About to Disappear. Part magic trick, part treatise on the imagination, Robbi Nester's ekphrastic poems lure and transform. 'Any plain ingredients, ' the poet explains, 'can rise to the occasion, becoming / a new thing.' Gathering memories, art, science, myth, history-even furniture, sea stars, and aliens-Nester delves deeper into and far beyond our own lives. Like the octopus Nester describes in one poem, each ekphrastic response is 'exactly the shape of whatever / it needs to be.'"
-Marjorie Maddox, author of In the Museum of My Daughter's Mind and Small Earthly Space
"As expansive and magical as the worlds it describes, Robbi Nester's poetry collection, About to Disappear, is a luminous, shape-shifting exploration of perception, transformation, and the alchemy of time. By the light of ekphrastic inspiration and with the deep attention of philosophical inquiry, Nester's poems transmute the ordinary into the extraordinary as clouds reform, light shifts, and unseen 'roots and tubers chart their path through darkness' beneath cold earth. 'Subject only to the weather, we / sail above you, understand solidity / as an illusion. In time, / wire rusts. Wood grows porous, / stone swells and contracts / so often it reverts / to sand, ' Nester writes, reminding us that nothing is so permanently wrought into form that it will not eventually dissolve and reclaim its wild potential, becoming, once more, the possibility of a new becoming."
-Melissa Studdard, librettist / lyricist, podcaster, and poet; author of Dear Selection Committee and I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast
"In About to Disappear Robbi Nester takes inspiration from many different artists and perspectives, but one thing remains true: the poet is the paintbrush . . . and more. Each poem stands on its own and does not require the reader to see or know the inspirational piece. You may want to check out the art later, but there is no need to see the pieces to understand the poems."
-J. P. Dancing Bear, writing consultant and editor of Verse Daily
American Gothic
After Grant Wood’s portrait
Weathered as the barn behind them,
hard-eyed and narrow, this pair
has a history that never needs to be spoken—
all the bad harvests, floods, ill fortune.
A few sparks shielded between their palms.
What little they own they built themselves.
No patience for roses. When they look
at the golden fields, they see only
what those sheaves will buy—a new roof,
some boots, a mule. They teach this
bitter wisdom: we must wrestle
this angel, the earth, until it yields,
must take what we can
before the storm comes,
before we return to dust.
Evolving Sirenian
After a painting by Sallie Swift
Everything in the ocean becomes something else.
Colonies of coral, once a soft carpet of color,
become brittle and white, the stuff of island sand.
The octopus embodies this quality of change.
Exactly the shape of whatever it needs to be,
the octopus pours itself between two rocks.
Its tentacles curl like breakers, tangled kelp fronds.
Caught in the act of transformation, the octopus
takes on the blue and orange of a large carcass,
flesh peeling in flakes from its side. Then, it
disappears, skin puckering in mock putrescence,
eye gaping like a wound. No wonder sailors
wandering at sea once mistook this creature for
a woman, hair trailing behind her in the green-blue
surf, singing the most beautiful song.
Flamingo in Lake Natron, Northern Tanzania
After a photograph by Nick Brandt
From above, the lake seems a kind of paradise,
the breeding ground of many migratory birds.
Already, flocks dot the shore. Yet the water teems
with hundreds of fallen birds looking for a place
to stretch and preen.
Those lured by the mirror of the lake’s red water,
so bright it’s visible from space, will die in this
runoff from the volcano, Ol Doinyo Lengai.
Their feathers harden into clumps of brittle string,
flattened winter weeds. Their wings lie heavy,
will never feel the touch of air again.
The hollow reeds that were their legs stuck fast
in silt, the boiling water thick as blood,
a bitter brew that turned them all to salt.
On Adaptation
Inspired by After the Rain (1879), Arkhip Kuindzhi, Solaris (1972),
Andrei Tarkovsky, and Solaris (1961), a novel by Stanislaw Lem
I peer from the portal, afraid to find
some portion of my past projected
on the mirror surface of this alien
world. The field beside the barn
takes shape as I watch, wrenched
whole from its foundation in memory,
dropped like a seed onto what had been
bare rock between two continents.
In this incarnation, the rain has just
ended, will soon begin again.
Dark clouds brood over the fields,
flashing, phosphorescent,
like deep-sea jellyfish. I suppose
at home we’d call this night,
and yet it isn’t quite, something other
than the ordinary. Cows still browse,
yet the sky, spent by the storm,
has at last left off illuminating
the surface of the planet,
a task taken up by this bright meadow,
this farm, simulacrum of our green island, Earth.
Still Standing
After Ivy and Winslow, David Graeme Baker
At first glance, I think she is a teacher
drawing on the chalkboard. One finger
rests on the crevice where the chalk is kept.
The other arm sweeps wide, into an arc
on the board’s murky green surface,
where transparent moon-jellies swarm:
words poorly erased. She drafts a magic
circle to protect her. Yet her feet are bare,
standing in a pool of long-dried paint,
as in a spotlight. I decide this is an abandoned
school, site of a shooting, now her studio,
where she can drop the line of her imagination,
netting the unexpected, lost voices of a thousand
children and their teachers. She probes a past
she doesn’t really know, like a scientist who
studies creatures making their own cold light
in the deepest ocean, dreams and dreams again
about this ruined room, its light and shadows,
settled dust, compelled to paint it in bright hues,
to return and make this place a kind of shrine,
left standing to remind us of all that has been lost.
To buy the book:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/about-to-disappear-robbi-nester/7a45626480903ea3?ean=9781962082884&next=t
https://www.amazon.com/About-Disappear-Robbi-Nester/dp/1962082881/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2AI08ENJ50HSD&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.oDjeYaZF08UikVfLi16Y4A.Sl3g3hHv53lY8u1jMl-_9efBgbtAKHg_5YAwRGRwDJc&dib_tag=se&keywords=about+to+disappear+robbi+nester&qid=1772585882&s=books&sprefix=about+to+dissapeaar+robbi+nester%2Cstripbooks%2C224&sr=1-1
https://shantiarts.co/#gsc.tab=0
http://www.robbinester.net/
