MPH and Other Road Poems

About the Author
Ed Roberson's eleven previous books of poetry include JUST IN: WORD OF NAVIGATIONAL CHALLENGES (Talisman House, Publishers, 1998), CITY ECLOGUE (Atelos, 2006), THE NEW WING OF THE LABRYRINTH (Singing Horse Press, 2009), MPH AND OTHER ROAD POEMS (VERGE Books, 2021) and the Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist and Kingsley-Tufts Award runner-up To See the Earth before the End of the World (2010). A former Special Programs administrator at Rutgers University's Cook Campus, Roberson has lived in Chicago since 2004 and is an emeritus professor in Northwestern University's MFA creative writing program. He has also held posts at the University of Chicago, Columbia College, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Cave Canem retreat for Black writers. His honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and the African American Literature and Culture Association's Stephen Henderson Critics Award.
Poetry. Edited by Andrew Peart. In 2015, while, in his words, "dismantling my house in New Jersey and preparing it for sale," Ed Roberson discovered in some envelopes in his attic a manuscript he thought lost, drawn from the experiences of the summer of 1970, when the poet, along with two friends, rode cross-country from Pittsburgh to San Francisco and back on two BMW motorcycles. The recovery of this manuscript‚--over forty years later--alerted Roberson to the fact that he had been relating to its material ever since, yielding for him work that "calls across the span of a lifetime." MPH is Roberson's epic, serial road poem, decades in the making, stamped with and guided by the talisman of its title. "one thing visible every day / any time 24/7 / for 3 months 8000 miles / was mph // on the speedometer. / a small petty thing. / a pin. / down of a larger / limiting. // a sighting an ideograph / even more than a picture beyond word."