How to Maintain Eye Contact

2022 Button Poetry Prize Runner-Up

How to Maintain Eye Contact takes readers through a journey of uncertainty and what we make of it.

Set in three sections, Robert Wood Lynn explores interior uncertainty, interpersonal uncertainty and uncertainty at a larger scale. These narrative poems, influenced by storytelling traditions, find themselves at the nexus of the intimate and the humorous, as well as the absurd and the tragic. These poems examine isolation and grief in their many forms—through heartbreak or the death of loved ones, or show us the world looking back at itself after it ends.