POST BOOK: TONY ROBLES

 The Halo-Halo Review is pleased to interview authors in the aftermath of their books’ releases. This issue’s featured authors include Tony Robles. 

 

What is your most recent book? 

My most recent book is Where the Warehouse Things Are, a collection of poetry.

 

Who published it and when was it released? 

The book was published by Redhawk Publications in Hickory, North Carolina in 2024. Redhawk also published my 3rd collection, Thrift Store Metamorphosis in 2023. That book was inspired by my job at Goodwill, where, at the time, I was working while pursuing my MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts. 

 

What has been the response/what has surprised you most about the response? 

The response has been positive. The poems in the book are entirely biographical. I began working in a warehouse 2 years ago as a warehouse tech. I had no experience and was unsure of myself going in. My job involves working with tools, assembling electric scooters and wheelchairs, manual wheelchairs and operating a forklift; things that I was uncomfortable with and intimidated by. A poet from my MFA program said the poems reminded him of the work of Philip Levine, which is a great compliment. The most surprising thing about the response to the book is that readers seem to identify with my insecurities and my struggle to overcome them in the arena of a warehouse where I am forced to confront my fears, using tools to shape a new poetic vision by way of twisting and contorting the tendons and muscles into curvatures I didn't think possible in order to give a fuller shape to my life via poetry. I now see that the warehouse offers possibilities to free myself from limitations I set upon myself. I think most people can relate to that.

 

(This a blurb from the book by novelist/poet Ron Rash who I think captures what I was going for in the book): 

In this remarkable collection, Tony Robles transforms a bright-lit warehouse into a psychic landscape to illuminate one man’s efforts to reassemble a broken life. Where the Warehouse Things Are gives the satisfaction of a book of poetry as well as a novelistic sense of a place and its inhabitants fully rendered.

—Ron Rash

 

Say something not obvious or known about the book. 

The book's title was inspired by the children's classic, Where the Wild Things Are, a book I read as a child. I identified with the kid in the book, entering a scary unknown place inhabited by creatures which, in my case, is represented by the setting of the unfamiliar territory of a warehouse with nuts and bolts and wrenches, pliers, impact drivers etc., things I'd never worked with. Those unfamilar things spoke to me, they told me I would push through, would succeed, that what I had to do was fight through it. I met my pet cat Francesca at the warehouse. She just appeared one day out of nowhere. My coworkers and I fell in love with her. She is a beautiful gray tabby with green eyes. We fed her and she kept coming back every day. My boss didn't want the cat hanging around, so it became a question of who's going to take this cat home? It was decided that I would take her. She was skittish so I bought a racoon trap from a hardware store and placed food in it next to the warehouse door on a Saturday. I drove off for an hour and when I returned, she was in the trap. And she was pissed. I never heard a cat snarl and hiss like she did in my life. But she warmed up to me after I brought her home. She cleared up my mouse problem in a week. I became convinced that fate brought us together because my coworker Bobby named her Francesca. This was significant because the editor of my first 2 books of poetry was the late Francesca Rosa, a novelist who passed away from cancer. She worked on my book, Fingerprints of a Hunger Strike, until the end. When Bobby said, why don't we name her Francesca, I knew it was fate. She's has been with me for 2 years now. Several poems in the collection are about her. Her presence lends tenderness and gentleness to the collection and to the masculine setting of the warehouse, showing that both can exist side by side and exude both grace and power.

What are you working on right now?

I am working on my first novel titled, The Backwards Man. It is a story set in San Francisco amidst an eviction crisis and one man's struggle to not be swallowed by the jaws of technocrats, real estate speculators and politicians in a city whose dystopian shadows are swallowing lives whole by the minute.

 

*****

Tony Robles is the author of the poetry collections, Cool Don’t Live Here No More—A Letter to San Francisco; Fingerprints of a Hunger Strike, and Thrift Store Metamorphosis. He was named Carl Sandburg Writer in Residence by the Friends of Carl Sandburg in Flat Rock, NC in 2020. He was short list nominated for Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2017. His poetry, short stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications. He earned his MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2023 and is currently a professor of creative writing in the MFA graduate program at Lenoir Rhyne University in North Carolina.